{"id":85,"date":"2018-08-19T05:41:01","date_gmt":"2018-08-19T05:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/?page_id=85"},"modified":"2018-09-05T04:42:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T04:42:42","slug":"phonemes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/home\/phonology\/phonemes\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonemes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--These are called phonemes and are written between two slashes using the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, the sound at the beginning of the word \"pit\" is \/p\/. Although speech is continuous, as we listen to someone speaking, we are able to break the words and phrases into individual segments, to which we ascribe meaning. Thus, we analyze the word \"pit\" as composed of three distinct segments, each of which is a meaningful phoneme: \/p\/, \/\u026a\/, and \/t\/, or simply \/p\u026at\/.--><\/p>\n<h3>Minimal pairs<\/h3>\n<p>A <strong>phoneme<\/strong> is the smallest meaningful unit of sound in a particular language. The key word in this definition is &#8220;meaningful.&#8221; There are many sounds we can make with our mouths, including coughing, grunts, and other noises, but only certain sounds have meaning for us in language. In order to determine if a sound has meaning to us, we set up a pair of words in which the only difference is one single sound. For example, let us take the word &#8220;bit,&#8221; or [b\u026at]. By writing these symbols between square brackets [ ] we signal that we are using the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. The square brackets are used to show that these sounds represent the pronunciation of the individual speaker. Let us now pair the word [b\u026at] with the word &#8220;pit&#8221;, in IPA [p\u026at]. Because we can distinguish a contrasting difference when we hear the words [b\u026at] and [p\u026at], that is, because we recognize these as two distinct words, we can determine that [b] and [p] must have a meaningful difference between them. In other words, these two sounds [b] and [p] are each phonemes in English. Since they are phonemes, we can write them between slashes: \/b\/ and \/p\/. Two words that differ by only a single phoneme are called <strong>minimal pairs<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, we can take the word &#8220;bit&#8221; [b\u026at] again, but this time, we can pronounce the initial consonant with a heavy breath of air. This is an &#8220;aspirated&#8221; [b], from the word &#8220;aspiration,&#8221; which means breathing. We can signify it in IPA by adding a superscript h like this: [b<sup>h<\/sup>]. Now let&#8217;s make a minimal pair, one with the word &#8220;bit&#8221; said in the usual way, [b\u026at], and one with the word said with an aspirated b, [b<sup>h<\/sup>\u026at]. In spite of the differences in the pronunciation of the first consonant, an English speaker will not hear these two pronunciations as two different words.\u00a0 [b\u026at] and [b<sup>h<\/sup>\u026at] both represent the same word &#8220;bit,&#8221; and therefore they\u00a0fail the minimal pair test. Therefore [b] and [b<sup>h<\/sup>] are not two distinct phonemes. They are two non-meaningful variants, called <strong>allophones<\/strong>, of the phoneme \/b\/.<\/p>\n<p><!--\n\nWords like \"pit\" and \"bit\" that differ by only a single phoneme are called <strong>minimal pairs<\/strong>. They are a useful way to determine whether sounds are phonemes or allophones. If we start with the word \"bit,\" we can change the word one sound at a time and create a list of English phonemes each time the new sound makes a new word. Take \"bit,\" and change the first sound to \"p\": \"pit.\" Now change the first sound to \"h\": \"hit\" or [h\u026at]. Now change the vowel to the \"ee\" sound, written [i]: \"heat\" or [hit]. Now change the last sound to the \"sh\" sound, or \/\u0283\/: \"sheet\" or \/\u0283it\/. Now change the last sound to the \"k\" sound: \"chic\" or \/\u0283ik\/. And so on. You can see here that the spelling changes in various unexpected ways, but if we write these words in IPA it is clearer that only one sound is changing at a time: \/b\u026at\/ ~ \/p\u026at\/ ~ \/h\u026at\/ ~ \/hit\/ ~ \/\u0283it\/ ~ \/\u0283ik\/. From this short list we can determine that the following phones are phonemes of English: \/p b h \u026a i t \u0283 k\/.\n\n\n<h3>Allophones<\/h3>\n\n\nIt may seem obvious that all these sounds are \"meaningful,\" but there are many different ways to pronounce sounds that have no meaningful distinction between them. Of course there are the grunts, burps, squeaks, laughs, etc. that we can make with our mouths, but even if we restrict our notice to actual speech sounds, we have many different types of sounds we can make that are not phonemes. These are written between square brackets. For example, if we take the word \"bid,\" we pronounce it with as [b\u026ad]\n\nFor example, we can pronounce the word \"bid\" with a long drawn-out vowel, which we can try to convey in English spelling as \"biiiiiiiid,\" or we could write it in IPA by adding the symbol [\u02d0], which is used to indicate a lengthened vowel: [b\u026a\u02d0d]. If we contrast this pronunciation with the normal way to say \"bid\" in a minimal pair, we get [b\u026ad] and [b\u026a\u02d0d]. These are two different ways to say the vowel, and yet the word remains \"bid.\" Therefore, the distinction between [\u026a] and [\u026a\u02d0] fail the minimal pair test, which tells us that there is no meaningful difference between them, that is, they are not two distinct phonemes. They are simply two different ways to say the phoneme \/\u026a\/. Non-meaningful variations of a phoneme are called <strong>allophones<\/strong>.\n\nOne more example of non-meaningful variants within a phoneme will suffice.\n\n--><\/p>\n<p>The set of phonemes that we will discuss on the following pages are those of English only. Every language has its own set of phonemes. There are languages, like Hindi, in which\u00a0[b] and [b<sup>h<\/sup>] are different phonemes; other languages have no phonemic distinction between [p] and [b].\u00a0The number of phonemes in different languages can also vary widely. Humans have the ability to produce about 600 different consonant sounds and 200 vowel sounds, but English only uses about 24 consonant phonemes and 15 vowel phonemes, for a total of 39 distinct meaningful sounds. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ubykh_language\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ubykh<\/a>, an extinct language from the Caucasus, had 86 phonemes&#8211;84 consonants and only 2 vowels! <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hawaiian_language#Phonology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hawaiian<\/a>, on the other hand, has only 13 distinct phonemes, 8 consonants and 5 vowels. It does not matter how many phonemes a language has; what matters is that the set of phonemes function as a system, where those sounds and only those are meaningful and capable of carrying information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Minimal pairs A phoneme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound in a particular language. The key word in this definition is &#8220;meaningful.&#8221; There are many sounds we can make with our mouths, including coughing, grunts, and other noises, but only certain sounds have meaning for us in language. In order to determine if a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":74,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-85","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/85\/revisions\/142"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}