Talk:Phoneme

Contents

1 Serbian orthography 2 /buts/ 2.1 Ligatures 3 Czech r-hacek 4 Slant brackets 5 Allophony 6 How many points of articulation used? 7 English has 40 phonemes 8 Phonetic languages 9 Phonological extremes 10 Chronemes 11 Historical Note

Serbian orthography

Rephrasing to avoid saying that the Serbo-Croatian orthography is perfectly phonemic; it's not, as it fails to represent stress, pitch, and length on vowels.

---

/buts/

I just removed this:

A sound that is a single phoneme in one language may be a phoneme cluster in another. For instance, /buts/ means leg-covering footwear in English and consists of four phonemes /b u t s/; but in Hebrew it means a kind of cloth and consists of only three phonemes /b u ts/.

In fact, /ts/ in English is two phonemes /t/ and /s/, while IIUC Hebrew /t_s/ ("t-s ligature") is one phoneme. It's not the same "thing" interpreted as a phoneme cluster in English and as a single phoneme in Hebrew. The Hebrew sound is an affricate, like English "ch".

I understand that some very common clusters may be interpreted as single phonemes in certain languages, for functional purposes. The Georgian "harmonic clusters" come to mind, but I'm really not sure, so I'd be thankful to anyone who can enlighten me on this. Pablo D. Flores 11:45, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Ligatures

Someone added a comment directly in the article asking for /tʃ/ to be written as the ligature /ʧ/. Ligatures are not required for affricates, though they may clarify things. It is best not to use this symbol, I'd say, because if the user's computer is not properly configured, they will at least see the "t". With the ligature symbol, they won't see anything. Also, unless we force another font, it won't even appear to be different from the non-ligatured version even on properly-configured machines. — Chameleon My page/My talk 07:03, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. Say no to ligatures.--[[User:HamYoyo|HamYoyo|TALK]] 08:14, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. There is a phonetic difference between the sequence and the affricate. Some languages have a contrast between these sounds. An example from Klallam:

[k̕ʷə́nts] 'he looks at it'   vs.   [k̕ʷə́nʦ] 'look at me'

(IPA doesnt really give a satisfactory symbolization of affricates). The issue mentioned above is irrelevent in many languages — but it is not with respect to Klallam. But even if it is irrelevant to English, it seems nice to symbolize phonemes in ways that show their similarities to the phonetic manifestation. Peace - Ish ishwar 07:47, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

I believe the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association says that affricate ligatures should only be used if necessary. Nohat 09:03, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I believe you are right (I dont have a copy of the handbook at home but this sems to be what I remember). However, other systems of phonetic transcription provide different symbols for affricates & their respective sequences. For example, in the system commonly used to transcribe Native American languages the alveolar affricate is [c] while the sequence is [ts]. There is generally a principle in phonetic/phonological transcription where only one symbol is used to represent each phoneme. Many linguists are dissatisfied with the IPA so they either (1) ignore it & create their own system or (2) join the IPA & vote for change (or of course they just deal it & leave it alone). (I just want to mention that the IPA is not without its controversies and within the entire corpus of linguistic literature the reader will find many other things besides IPA.)

So with this said, I like the digraph (and at the least the ligature) because it abheres to this one symbol = one phoneme principle (the ligatured affricate adheres marginally so). You can note that unicoded IPA doesnt have digraph characters for lateral affricates, but I point out that other transcription systems do have unitary symbols for these as well. But then there are the practical issues with improper font rendering & the trend in wikipedia to only use IPA. I dont know. I am just dissatisfied with IPA in this regard. There is a phonetic difference and sometimes a phonological difference, but IPA is a bit clunky in its symbolization. Thanks! --Ish ishwar 20:31, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC) - Ish ishwar 23:25, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Czech r-hacek

The text says:

Possibly the rarest sound is the one represented by "r hacek" (found in the name Dvorak) in the Czech language; it appears to be unique to the language.

I think this sound (ř) is similar or equal to the one of French 'j'. It is also close (and related) to Polish 'rz'. -- AdSR

/ř/ is not equivalent to French /j/; French /j/ is the same as the English /s/ in measure, correct? Czech has the letter ž for that. /ř/ is similar, but it's rolled. I believe the Polish rz is closer to the Czech ž than to ř. —Bkell 02:18, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

A Czech taught me to pronounce it once. It seemed to me to be /r/ and /ʒ/ articulated simultaneously. — Chameleon My page/My talk 07:03, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Some Spanish speakers have the r-hacek sound for <rr>, although it is nonstandard and not terribly common.

Which speakers do that? Chameleon 18:17, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Spanish speakers in the north-western parts of Argentina (provinces of La Rioja and Tucumán, at least, come to mind). Former president Carlos Menem (a curse be upon him) has this pronunciation, as well as famous folkloric singer Mercedes Sosa. I have a different dialect but the r-hacek is not that difficult to make, really. --Pablo D. Flores 01:40, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

---

Czech is certainly NOT the only language to have a phoneme unique to it. Dozens if not hundreds of languages share this property. Czech r-hacek just happens to be the example that is most well-known to Western linguists.

---

Slant brackets

The text says:

For technical reasons (slant brackets interfere with the mechanism of Wikipedia), it is advisable to square brackets for phonemic as well as phonetic transcription in Wikipedia entries.

I think this "feature" has been removed from Wikipedia. Should this para be excised? Hari

Yes, it should be excised. Slant brackets around lowercase letters have never been a problem on Wikipedia. The mess that most of them are in was caused by the use of a buggy conversion script, which thankfully was a once-only event. --Zundark, 2002 Mar 11

---

25 vowels in Punjabi? I find that hard to believe. Nagari has 13 vowel letters, of which one (vocalic 'l') is used only in one Sanskrit word; the others are six vowels (aiueor) with short/long/diphthong variations. -phma

Don't confuse language and writing system. The English alphabet only contains five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) but (depending on dialect), the language itself contains more (bat, bath, bait, bet, beat, knit, night, not, note, boy, naught, soot, suit, such, aout, about) Hippietrail 07:25, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

---

Allophony

The sounds /z/ and /s/ are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish.

Out of curiosity, what sound environment makes a Spanish speaker say [z]? Off the top of my head, it seems like every use of the letter "z" should be pronounced as [s]. Not that spelling and phones/phonemes need to be very intimately related, of course; the main point is: I can't think of any Spanish word with a [z] sound. Maybe it's a feature of some particular pockets of Spanish? -- Ryguasu

What relation does <z> have with /z/ in Spanish? None. <z> is always the phoneme /θ/, with the voiced allophone [ð] before certain voiced consonants. Similarly, <s> is always the phoneme /s/, with the voiced allophone [z] before certain voiced consonants, e.g. <desde> /'desde/ ['dezde]. — Chameleon My page/My talk 07:03, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

You'll occasionally hear Spanish speakers using the /z/ sound for an S that appears before a voiced consonant in a phrase like ¿Quién es David?, but certainly never in a word by itself, so it probably isn't a great example of an allophone. --LDC

Depends on dialect. There are many allophones of /s/. Most Spanish dialects have two: One at the beginning of syllables, one at the end of syllables. There may be different pronunciations at the ends of words than at the ends of syllables. The syllable-final allophones may be /h/ or /z/ before voiced (as in /desde/, /mismo/, or a lengthening of the previous vowel. Some dialects don't have syllable-final /s/ at all. The majority of the Spanish speakers don't have a distinct /T/ phoneme, but only /s/. If such a dialect voices syllable-final /s/, then <z> may be [z], e.g. in <feroz> /fe'ros/ [fe'roz]. J. 'mach' wust 13:16, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think German is a better example of [s] and [z] being allophones of /s/. Hippietrail 07:25, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wrong. German has both phonemes.

as far as I know, you are correct. By the way, in some cases z and s are allophones in English (for the plural -- or maybe it is /ez/) Slrubenstein

Right. For example, chairs ends in [z], while cats ends in [s]. -- Ryguasu

Allophones or allomorphs? --Brion

Yes, those are allomorphs. A better example of allophones in English would be the aspirated T at the beginning of "tip" and the non-aspirated T at the end of "pit", which English treats as the same sound in all contexts. --LDC

Also light versus dark "l" and the several realizations of /r/ depending on dialect and phonetic context. Hippietrail 07:25, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

---

How many points of articulation used?

Surely Dyirbal doesn't have the most places of articulation? I can think of languages that use more than six. Ubykh, for instance, contrasts voiceless fricatives in alveolar, postalveolar, alveolopalatal, retroflex, velar, uvular and glottal classes: sa sword, sha head, s^ja arrow, sra firewood, xa testis, qha to weave, hænda now. thefamouseccles 00:41, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

If I understand the points of articulation correctly, my dialect of English uses eight: bilabial (/p/), labiodental (/f/), dental (/T/), alveolar (/s/), palatal (/j/), retroflex (the "er" in "butter"; not sure what its IPA or SAMPA sign is), velar (/k/), and glottal (/h/). --Jim Henry 15:51, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Good observation! It seems to me that for this kind of figure of the articulation points, there need to be samples of the same manner of articulation, normally stops (?) (many languages have more places of articulation for fricatives). J. 'mach' wust 13:05, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

English has 40 phonemes

Where does this figure come from? Doesn't it depend on dialect, due mainly to differences in vowel inventories but also to whether, e.g., "whales" and "Wales" are pronounced differently? Josh Cherry 22:15, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• It's an approximate figure, but is pretty standard in linguistic texts. It's meant to include all sounds that are phonemes in any English dialect. It doesn't depend on specific word-pairs, but on whether a given sound (e.g. "wh") is the sole difference in at least one word-pair in at least one dialect. - Nunh-huh 22:24, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  • OK, but perhaps this can be clarified. For one thing, it would tend to inflate the figure, and would be misleading in a comparison to a language with less diversity. Also, the Oxford Companion to the English Language says that Received Pronunciation alone has 24 consonants and 20 vowels. Josh Cherry 22:35, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
    • English has 24 consonants including affricates and excluding foreign sounds such as /x/. It has 12 simple vowels and 8 diphthongs. Of course, not everyone speaks like this. Where I'm from, /h/ is deleted, /θ/ becomes [f] and /ð/ becomes [v]... but "English" without adjectives means "standard English". — Chameleon My page/My talk 22:51, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
      • I don't think it would hurt to say "standard". More important, at least on this side of the pond "standard English" does not necessarily mean RP. I doubt that the numbers are the same for standard American English, for example. I wouldn't make a statement like "English is non-rhotic" just because RP is. Josh Cherry 23:34, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
        • I don't take "English" without adjectives to mean "standard English". What is "standard" after all? The number of phonemes depends on your dialect. How does one say that one dialects is "standard" whilst another is not? Wouldn't it be better to avoid this whole debate and specify a well know dialect or two? Or perhaps it would be best to give a range. Whatever is to be done the following sentence from Phonemic extremes needs a rewrite. The English language itself uses a rather large set of 13 vowels, though its 27 consonants are pretty close to average. Some dialects might have as few as 13 vowels but ... 27 consonants? 40 - 13 = 27. I smell a rat. - Jimp 25Apr05 ... Okay I've changed it so as to give a range. The range I gave was 13 to 22 vowels plus 22 to 26 consonants. I'm no linguist and my range might be wrong but as far as I'm aware this is about right. At least it's more correct than what was there before. - Jimp 23May05

Phonetic languages

Jight, Kollipy, Proto-combobulationism, Knick-pawn, Spoying the waze, Psycho-stellization.

I've just invented all these words randomly. I bet that, if you said them, your pronunciation would be the one I intended. The spelling system of English follows rules and is largely predictable. Not as much as Spanish, but much, much less than Chinese. English as an "unphonetic language" is therefore an exaggeration and a simplification.

Furthermore, Italian is a bad example. It is far less "phonetic" than Spanish, say. Mi piace la pesca means "I like the peach" or "I like fishing" depending on whether you say /'peska/ or /'pεska/. Pizza is pronounced /pittsa/, but piza would also represent this pronunciation. Similarly, /piddza/ would also be spelt pizza or piza. It is an irregular system compared to Spanish. Chamaeleon 21:52, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Nobody says English is "unphonetic", just that it is more so than most other languages sharing its alphabet. English is often unpredictable both ways: text to speach and speach to text; French only one way: mostly it is dependably pronounceable, but spelling from sound needs etymological and semantic knowledge.

"easy" examples as above are easy to construct, but:

• how to pronounce "read" without knowing the tense intended?
• how to write identically sounding words of "red" (colour) and "read" (past tense)
• examples like this can be found in masses

I still maintain there is no set of rules that comes close to consistent: a majority of over 50% correct guesses is not enough to be convincing; should be at least 95%. --Woodstone 22:26, 2005 Jan 17 (UTC)

I think it is strange to use the term "phonetic language". It seems to be resulting from a confusion between a language's sounds & a language's orthography. One language cannot be more phonetic than other language because phonetic refers to the sounds occurring in languages & all langs have sounds (the definition must be extended to include signed langs). No writing system is truely phonetic: the sounds represented by [t] differ acoustically & articulatorily in every different environment. Cheers! - Ish ishwar 07:26, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Of course, as the article indicates "phonetic language" is a misnomer, but is the term many people use to discuss a language having a "phonetic spelling". This should be regarded within the language itself. For a language with an ideally phonetic spelling, there would be a set of rules that would allow to write down any spoken word correctly and read out any written word correctly without needing semantic or etymologic knowledge. Because different langages usually have different phonologies they need different rule sets if they share the same writing system (unless the script carries no phonological information at all) --Woodstone 15:36, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Yes. So my covert question was: Why are discussing orthography in a entry on phoneme which has to be with sound systems not writing systems? --Ish ishwar 21:20, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Good point, but in order to discuss phonemes in a text media, a way to write them down is needed. In that context it is worthwhile to point out the fundamental difference (and at the same time the similarity) with orthography. That does not merit an article on its own, so it doesn't strike me as too much out of place here. --Woodstone 22:45, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Phonological extremes

It seems that the comparison between Spanish "sin" and English "seen" is incorrect. English "seen" would be spelled in IPA like [si:n]. The reason of this mistake is perhaps that it is hard to find words with a short [i] in English. The point being made is correct, but the example is wrong. --Woodstone 15:43, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

I dont have a problem with this example. The example just is just using a broader transcription than what you write above (in fact the English vowel would probably be nasalized & many Eng. dialects have a following off-glide, so you could be even narrower). The example, I believe, is concerned with only the vowel quality not the duration. It stills illustrates the point: phonetically similar phonemes symbolized with the same character are not equivalent.

On a slightly different note, from a functional phonological perspective (from André Martinet) similar phonemes in separate languages can never be equated with each other because every language has a different phonological system & therefore the phonemes to be compared have a different set of oppositions to the other phonemes within their respective languages.

An issue that I would bring up is why do we need to mention that languages have unique sounds? Isnt this a matter of phonetic inventories & not a matter of phonology? Why does this belong? I think that we could say that every phoneme is unique to a particular language & if measured in precise acoustic detail every phonetic manifestation of a phoneme is unique to a particular language. We can only speak of similarity.

Further comment is quite welcome. Cheers! --Ish ishwar 21:15, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

Agree that any phonetic transcription can be done in broad or narrow ways. However, when stating an IPA transcription, the one commonly used (or the closest one from the standard IPA set) should be chosen. This still leaves a range of broadness (nasality, off-glide) that can be ignored. My OED describes the vowel explicitly as long, so representing English "seen" by /sin/ is unusual. It must be possible to find a better example. --Woodstone 22:53, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

It is not so clear from the article, but I think that the example is trying to illustrate that a phoneme /i/ is not equivalent between languages. Although Spanish & English both have /i/, in English /i/ is phonetically [iː] or [ij] or [ɪj] while in Spanish /i/ is phonetically [i] (?) (I dont know Spanish phonetics). So, the phonological representation is the same, but the phonetic representation is different. Most of what I have seen on English writes the English phoneme as /i/ and only when discussing phonetics is a phonetic representation given.

But if one wants an example that has phonemes that are even more phonetically similar, then I offer a comparison between Japanese, French, & Italian /i/. Japanese /i/ is less close than French /i/ and it is less front than Italian /i/ (Akamatsu 1997:30). So taking Daniel Jones' cardinal vowel [i] as a reference & using IPA diacritics, we have:

• French /i/ = [ i̱ ]
• Italian /i/ = [ i̞ ]
• Japanese /i/ = [ i̱̞ ]

What does everyone think? (my browser doesnt really display the diacritics correctly in wikipedia) - Ish ishwar 23:54, 2005 Jan 26 (UTC)

References:

• Akamatsu, Tsutomu. (1997). Japanese phonetics: Theory and practice. LINCOM studies in Asian linguistics 03. München: LINCOM EUROPA.

The long/short distinction for English vowels is indeed traditionally transcribed for British English, but not for American English, which accounts for well more than half of native English speakers. The difficulty is that most American dictionaries don't use IPA. However, if you read, for example, the front matter of Jones' English Pronouncing Dictionary, it talks about how the length difference is not considered salient at all for American English. The phonetics section at the beginning of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary, too, describes all the symbols used in the dictionary in terms of IPA symbols, and length marking is not used for [i]. Also, the American Heritage Dictionary doesn't use length marking for any of the vowel symbols in the pronunciation key which maps AHD symbols to IPA symbols. The reality is that the length difference between [i] and say [E] is very small in American English, particularly when compared to the lengthening effect of following voiced consonants, which is much greater. That is, the difference in vowel length is much greater between seed and seat (both [i]) than it is between seed and said.

But even disregarding all of this, the point I intended was about vowel quality. Spanish [i] is higher (closer) and produced with more spread lips than English [i]. Spanish [i] is also totally monophthongal, while like pretty much all English vowels, English [i] can be slightly diphthongal. In fact, when non-English speakers make fun of English by speaking in a pseudo-English babble, one of the defining characteristics of this babble is that it contains no stable vowels. I guess ultimately the point is that the symbol [i] corresponds to an area within the vowel space and not a particular point, and each language that has a sound that is transcribed as [i] doesn't have the same [i] as other languages' [i]. Of course, the exact quality of a vowel varies from speaker to speaker and even from phonetic environment to phonetic environment, but doing statistical analyses of samples of different speakers havs enabled phoneticians to pin down approximately where overall English [i] is and approximately where Spanish [i] is and they're not the same place. I'm kind of babbling on here. Perhaps some of this should go on the page. Nohat 02:44, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Chronemes

The bit about tonemes seems relevant, but do chronemes really belong here? After some googling, it appears that the term appears most often in discussions of articulatory physiology, rather than phonology. Also, I've always found references to length as a feature of phonemes, just like point of articulation, nasalization, etc. I'm not a linguist, so maybe there's a theory that considers length not as a feature but as something different... -- Pablo D. Flores 21:22, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There are languages with many minimal pairs where length of either a vowel or consonant is the only differentiating factor between words. The "handbook of the international phonetic association" mentions them (as chronemes) parallel to differentiation by tone or stress. In English there are differences in length, but these are never distinctive for meaning. That may be the reason they seem outlandish. −Woodstone 21:33, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

I'm fully aware that length is a contrast; I was mentioning the fact that I hadn't heard of chronemes as such. Instead, I've always seen phonemes described as a set of features, where length is just one of them. For example, /i:/ = [+high][+front][-rounded][+long]. Unlike tone, I have not seen length considered apart from the description of a phoneme. But if the IPA handbook mentions chronemes, I'm fine with it. --Pablo D. Flores 14:32, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree that length could be seen as just one more attribute of a phoneme, but then so is tone. If there is a toneme, there should be a chroneme (I have even seen a few references to stroneme for stress distinctions). Perhaps the choice of IPA to represent them both as separate symbols (both can be coded in-line) makes them lean towards a separate class. −Woodstone 14:57, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

Historical Note

I object to the following: "The phoneme is a structuralist abstraction that was introduced by the Polish-Russian linguist Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi (1890-1938). It was later adapted to and formally psychologized in generative linguistics (after Chomsky and Halle). Rather than a basic mental unit of language, however, it may well be a perceptual artifact of alphabetic literacy (see the terms Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness)."

Baudouin de Courtenay's phoneme was "psychological", not "structuralist". It was actually Saussure who introduced the structuralist concept, which was based on the work of Baudouin and Kruszewski. Baudouin had a concept that tolerated absolute phonetic neutralization between phonemes, which was not characteristic of structuralism. Sapir's phoneme was "psychological" in Baudouin's sense.

Regarding the contribution of Chomsky and Halle, it is fairly orthodox thinking that they "psychologized" the phoneme, but they themselves claimed to be following in the footsteps of Sapir. In point of fact, they did not follow Sapir's or Baudouin's concept of the "psychological phoneme". Unlike Baudouin and Sapir, Chomsky and Halle made no clear distinction between phonology (Trubetzkoy's term for Baudouin's "physiophonetics") and morphophonology (Trubetzkoy's term for Baudouin's "psychophonetics"). The physiophonetic/psychophonetic dichotomy was fundamental to Baudouin's theory of phonemes, and it was maintained (albeit less explicitly) in Sapir's writings. Generative linguists tend to recognize the dichotomy in various ways, but they do not recognize it as representing two separate components of grammatical description. While generative theory is a psychological approach to language, its level of "systematic phonemics" is far more abstract than that of earlier psychological theories. To claim that phonemic awareness is an "artifact" of literacy may make sense from a generativist point of view, since generative theory has rejected the phonology/morphonology split as a fundamental dichotomy, but that claim reverses and obfuscates the earlier viewpoint that phonemes motivated alphabetic writing, rather than vice versa.

Baudouin de Courtenay originally linked phonemes to two phenomena: alphabetic writing and rhyme. Nothing has yet been added to point out the fact that rhyme was also important to the concept of the phoneme. Perhaps that is because orthodox generative phonology is even worse at explaining the phenomenon of rhyme than it is at explaining the phenomenon of alphabets.