From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme 191116
The following are also linked to Wikipedia:
14 See also
15
Notes
16 Bibliography
BEPS01-2.htm
by U Kyaw Tun (UKT) (M.S., I.P.S.T., USA), Tun Institute of Learning
(TIL).
Based on Burmese Grammar and Grammatical Analysis
by A. W. Lonsdale, Education Department, Burma, British Burma Press, Rangoon,
1899. In two parts:
Part 1. Orthoepy (pronunciation) and orthography (spelling) --
BG1899-1-indx.htm -
update 2019Nov
Part 2. Accidence (morphology) and syntax (sentence structure) --
BG1899-2-indx.htm - update
121117
I plan to update Lonsdale's work and name it BEPS (Burmese, English, Pali,
Sanskrit speeches in Myanmar, Latin, and Devanagri scripts) Grammar. But before
I could do it, I must equip myself with Linguistics and Phonetics. Not for sale. No copyright. Free for
everyone. Prepared for students and
staff of TIL Research Station, Yangon, MYANMAR :
http://www.tuninst.net ,
www.romabama.blogspot.com
Phoneme
Introduction - Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme 191113
Notation - Wiki
Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes
- Wiki
Minimal pairs - Wiki
Suprasegmental phonemes - Wiki
Distribution of allophones - Wiki
Background and related ideas - Wiki
Restriction on occurrence - Wiki
Biuniqueness - Wiki
Neutralization and archiphonemes - Wiki
Morphophonemes - Wiki
Numbers of phonemes in different languages - Wiki
The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions - Wiki
Correspondence between Letters and Phonemes
- Wiki
In sign languages - Wiki
Chereme - Wiki
UKT: End of Wiki article
UKT 191113: A Phoneme is a sound unit. It is recorded graphically by making marks on paper or any other substrate. A Grapheme is meant to represent a particular Phoneme. The ideal is a one-to-one correspondence between a Phoneme and Grapheme. The result is what you call a Phonetic representation. Bur-Myan comes closest to this one-to-one correspondence based on Burmese phonology. I've designed Romabama to have this one-to-one correspondence. International Phonetic Alphabet also aims for this correspondence, but it is useless for my purpose because it is not ASCII compatible, whereas Romabama is.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme 191116
The following are also linked to Wikipedia:
14 See also
15 Notes
16 Bibliography
My version of MLC Burmese Grammar is now available as pdf pages on the Internet, uploaded by
https://whiteboylearningburmese.wordpress.com/books/ 160409
See downloaded pdf files in TIL PDF libraries: HD-PDF-B and SD-PDF-B (link chk 191010)
1. bg-mlc-1-1. 2. bg-mlc-1-2. 3. bg-mlc-1-3. 4. bg-mlc-1-4. 5. bg-mlc-2-5. 6. bg-mlc-2-6.
1. bkp1. --- --- 2. bkp2. --- ---- 3. bkp3.--- ---- 4. bkp4. -- - --- 5. bkp5. --- ---- 6. bkp6.
Ink-on-paper book available in TIL Research Library in 3 volumes, 17 sections.
A phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language.
UKT 191126: From the studies of human sound production
{þûd~da.} we arrived at the term phoneme. Again from it, we get two disciplines: Phonetics and Phonology. Let's see their difference from the point of view of Western linguists. Remember, our eastern linguists have been studying
See a video by Jürgen Handke, in TIL HD-VIDEO and SD-VIDEO libraries in Phonetics section:
- PHY101-PhoneticsPhonology<Ô> / Bkp<Ô> (link chk 191126)But still, the study is incomplete because it leaves out how we hear it. We heard a foreign language sound restricted by the our mother tongue or L1 and by our culture.
For example, in most dialects of English [citation needed], the sound patterns /sɪn/ (sin) and /sɪŋ/ (sing) are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/, for another phoneme, /ŋ/. (Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair.) In many other languages, they would be interpreted as exactly the same set of phonemes, and so /n/ and /ŋ/ would be considered to be the same.
In linguistics, phonemes that are usually established by the use of minimal pairs, such as kill vs kiss or pat vs bat, are written between slashes: /p/. To show pronunciation more precisely, linguists use square brackets: [pʰ] (indicating an aspirated p).
See videos by Jürgen Handke, in TIL HD-VIDEO and SD-VIDEO libraries in Phonetics section: (link chk 191126)
- PHY101-Phoneme1<Ô> / Bkp<Ô>
- PHY102-Phoneme2<Ô> / Bkp<Ô>
Within linguistics, there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic (or phonematic) terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) that are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. [UKT ¶]
For example, the English k sounds in the words kill and skill are not identical (as described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme /k/. Speech sounds that differ but do not create a meaningful change in the word are known as allophones of the same phoneme. Allophonic variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may otherwise be free, and may vary per speaker or per dialect. Therefore, phonemes are often considered to constitute an abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or the surface form.
Phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds (phones) are placed between square brackets. Thus, /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes, /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/ (the word push in Standard English), and [pʰʊʃ] represents the phonetic sequence of sounds [pʰ] (aspirated p), [ʊ], [ʃ] (the usual pronunciation of push). This should not be confused with the similar convention of the use of angle brackets to enclose the units of orthography, graphemes. For example, ⟨f⟩ represents the written letter (grapheme) f.
UKT 191116: Wikipedia's choice of angle brackets ⟨f⟩ is unnecessarily troublesome. Character Map gives some more: ‹ › 〈 〉.
I feel that the angle bracket given on key board is enough for my work.
The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the same set of symbols most commonly used for phones. (For computer-typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters.) However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. [UKT ¶]
For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle, ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach is often hampered by the complexity of the relationship between orthography and pronunciation (see § Correspondence between letters and phonemes below).
A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same
function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the
English phoneme
/k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit,
scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not
notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not
identical: in kit
[kʰɪt],
the sound is aspirated, but in skill
[skɪl],
it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds,
or
phones, transcribed
[kʰ] for the aspirated form and.
[k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless
considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead
of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form
[kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be
recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if
substituted: for example, substitution of the sound
[t] would produce the different word still, and that sound
must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme
/t/).
The above shows that in English,
[k]
{k} and
[kʰ]
{hk} are
allophones of a single phoneme
/k/. [UKT ¶]
In some languages, however,
[kʰ]
{hk} and
[k]
are perceived by native speakers as different sounds, and
substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word. In those
languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example,
in
Icelandic,
[kʰ] is the first sound of kátur, meaning "cheerful", but
[k] is the first sound of gátur, meaning "riddles". Icelandic,
therefore, has two separate phonemes
/kʰ/ and
/k/.
UKT 191117: In Bur-Myan, [kʰ]
The above para has drawn my attention to the Icelandic language. Notice the presence of phones in Palatal, Velar, and Glottal regions: k , kʰ , ŋ , ɲ .
UKT 191120: In Bur-Myan and Mon-Myan, the approximants of these three regions
give rise to secondary articulation known in Bur-Myan as
{Ña.hswè:}*,
{ya.pín.}, and
{ha.hto:}. These I equate to Palatalization, Velarization, and Glotallization.
Whether I can substantiate my claim is still an open question. See Wikipedia:
• -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization 191120
• -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velarization 191120
• -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalization 191120
*
{Ña.hswè:} is found in Mon-Myan. In Mon, the hanging consonant is Nya-major,
whereas its equivalent in Sanskrit is Nya-minor.
A pair of words like kátur and gátur (above) that differ only in one phone is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, [kʰ] and [k]). The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme.
UKT 191117: The above para is incomplete from Bur-Myan point of view. We have: tenuis {ka.} , voiceless {hka} , and voiced {ga.}. Comparing kátur and gátur does not make sense. The equivalent comparison is between {hka.} (voiceless), and {ga.} (voice). It is not between {ka.} (tenuis) and {ga.} (voiced). The confusion in English is due to the absence of tenuis (or tenuis-voiceless).
What my North-American friends could not hear is the difference between {ka.} and {hka.} - both Velar. Moreover, they have difficulties in the Palatals. We use Palatal-stops, but they use only Palatal-affricates. My name is KYAW (velar-stop) "famous", not CHAW (palatal-affricate) "beautiful". The result: my official name change from Kyaw Tun, to Joe Kyaw Tun when I took up Canadian citizenship.
To take another example, the minimal pair tip and dip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/; since both words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds.
In other languages, however, including Korean, both sounds [t] and [d] occur, but no such minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing [t] and [d] in Korean provides evidence that they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. The word /tata/ is pronounced [tada], for example. That is, when they hear this word, Korean-speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, but English-speakers perceive different sounds in these two locations.
Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), also have minimal pairs, differing only in (exactly) one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and nonmanual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays the same, but one of the parameters changes. [1]
However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be so dissimilar phonetically that it is unlikely for speakers to perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in hat) and [ŋ] (as in bang), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of the same phoneme. However, they are so dissimilar phonetically that they are considered separate phonemes. [2]
Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of the language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is virtually impossible to find a minimal pair to distinguish English /ʃ/ from /ʒ/, yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' /ˈprɛʃər/ and 'pleasure' /ˈplɛʒər/ can serve as a near minimal pair. [3]
Besides segmental phonemes such as vowels and consonants, there are also suprasegmental features of pronunciation (such as tone and stress, syllable boundaries and other forms of juncture, nasalization and vowel harmony), which, in many languages, can change the meaning of words and so are phonemic.
Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, the word invite stressed on the second syllable is a verb, but when stressed on the first syllable (without changing any of the individual sounds), it becomes a noun. The position of the stress in the word affects the meaning, so a full phonemic specification (providing enough detail to enable the word to be pronounced unambiguously) would include indication of the position of the stress: /ɪnˈvaɪt/ for the verb, /ˈɪnvaɪt/ for the noun. In other languages, such as French, word stress cannot have this function (its position is generally predictable) and is therefore not phonemic (and is not usually indicated in dictionaries).
Phonemic tones are found in languages such as
Mandarin Chinese, in which a given syllable can have five different tonal
pronunciations:
Here, the character 媽 (pronounced mā, high level pitch) means "mother"; 麻 (má, rising pitch) means "hemp"; 馬 (mǎ, falling then rising) means "horse"; 罵 (mà, falling) means "scold", and 嗎 (ma, neutral tone) is an interrogative particle. [UKT ¶]
UKT 191117: Bur-Myan is not a tonal language. It is a pitch-register language similar to Shanghai dialect.
The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes. Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, although they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude.
When a phoneme has more than one allophone, the one actually heard at a given occurrence of that phoneme may be dependent on the phonetic environment (surrounding sounds) – allophones which normally cannot appear in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution. In other cases the choice of allophone may be dependent on the individual speaker or other unpredictable factors – such allophones are said to be in free variation.
The term phonème (from Ancient Greek φώνημα phōnēma, "sound made, utterance, thing spoken, speech, language" [4]) was reportedly first used by A. Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. [5] The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. [UKT ¶]
Daniel Jones became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language". [6] The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoy and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. Some structuralists (though not Sapir) rejected the idea of a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme. [7] [8]
Later, it was used and redefined in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, [9] and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology. As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others. [10]
UKT 191118: What are generative linguistics , and generative grammar ?
"Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term 'generative' is a concept borrowed from mathematics, indicating a set of definitions rather than a system that creates something. " Google: Oct 18, 2013
See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar 191118
"Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the theoretical linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. [1]
Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle) proposed that phonemes may be further decomposable into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. [11] Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be characterized in different ways: Jakobson and colleagues defined them in acoustic terms, [12] Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly articulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features, while Ladefoged's system [13] is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'.
In the description of some languages, the term chroneme has been used to indicate contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes. Though not all scholars working on such languages use these terms, they are by no means obsolete.
By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme, such as morpheme and grapheme. These are sometimes called emic units. The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike, who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics. [14]
Languages do not generally allow words or syllables to be built of any arbitrary sequences of phonemes; there are phonotactic restrictions on which sequences of phonemes are possible and in which environments certain phonemes can occur. Phonemes that are significantly limited by such restrictions may be called restricted phonemes.
UKT 191117: Whenever you talk of syllables, make sure how you define its canonical structure
• Abugida-Akshara system: CVÇ , e.g. Bur-Myan
• Alphabetic-Letter system: CVC , e.g. Engl-Lat
In English, examples of such restrictions include:
• /ŋ/, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other languages, such as Māori, Swahili, Tagalog, and Thai, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially).
• /h/ occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few languages, such as Arabic, or Romanian allow /h/ syllable-finally).
• In non-rhotic dialects, /ɹ/ can only occur immediately before a vowel, never before a consonant.
• /w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable (except in interpretations where a word like boy is analyzed as /bɔj/).
Some phonotactic restrictions can alternatively be analyzed as cases of neutralization. See Neutralization and archiphonemes below, particularly the example of the occurrence of the three English nasals before stops.
Biuniqueness is a requirement of classic structuralist phonemics. It means that a given phone, wherever it occurs, must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words, the mapping between phones and phonemes is required to be many-to-one rather than many-to-many. The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English. This may cause either /t/ or /d/ (in the appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone [ɾ] (an alveolar flap). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hitting and bidding, although it is clearly intended to realize the phoneme /t/ in the first word and /d/ in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness.
For further discussion of such cases, see the next section.
Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they do not contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In these positions it may become less clear which phoneme a given phone represents. Absolute neutralization is a phenomenon in which a segment of the underlying representation is not realized in any of its phonetic representations (surface forms). The term was introduced by Paul Kiparsky (1968), and contrasts with contextual neutralization where some phonemes are not contrastive in certain environments. [15] Some phonologists prefer not to specify a unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification. An archiphoneme is an object sometimes used to represent an underspecified phoneme.
An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels /a/ and /o/. These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables the contrast is lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [ə] (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian). In order to assign such an instance of [ə] to one of the phonemes /a/ and /o/, it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed). In some cases even this may not provide an unambiguous answer. A description using the approach of underspecification would not attempt to assign [ə] to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like |A|, which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position.
A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three nasal phonemes /m, n, ŋ/. In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by the minimal triplet sum /sʌm/, sun /sʌn/, sung /sʌŋ/. However, before a stop such as /p, t, k/ (provided there is no morpheme boundary between them), only one of the nasals is possible in any given position: /m/ before /p/, /n/ before /t/ or /d/, and /ŋ/ before /k/, as in limp, lint, link ( /lɪmp/, /lɪnt/, /lɪŋk/). The nasals are therefore not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists this makes it inappropriate to assign the nasal phones heard here to any one of the phonemes (even though, in this case, the phonetic evidence is unambiguous). Instead they may analyze these phones as belonging to a single archiphoneme, written something like |N|, and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be |lɪNp|, |lɪNt|, |lɪNk|.
This latter type of analysis is often associated with Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school. Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter within pipes, as with the examples |A| and |N| given above. Other ways the second of these might be notated include |m-n-ŋ|, {m, n, ŋ}, or |n*|
Another example from English, but this time involving complete phonetic convergence as in the Russian example, is the flapping of /t/ and /d/ in some American English (described above under Biuniqueness). Here the words betting and bedding might both be pronounced [ˈbɛɾɪŋ]. Under the generative grammar theory of linguistics, if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related forms bet and bed, for example) would reveal which phoneme the flap represents, once it is known which morpheme is being used. [16] However, other theorists would prefer not to make such a determination, and simply assign the flap in both cases to a single archiphoneme, written (for example) |D|.
A morphophoneme is a theoretical unit at a deeper level of abstraction than traditional phonemes, and is taken to be a unit from which morphemes are built up. A morphophoneme within a morpheme can be expressed in different ways in different allomorphs of that morpheme (according to morphophonological rules). For example, the English plural morpheme -s appearing in words such as cats and dogs can be considered to consist of a single morphophoneme, which might be written (for example) //z// or |z|, and which is pronounced as [s] after most voiceless consonants (as in cats) and [z] in most other cases (as in dogs).
All known languages use only a small subset of the many possible sounds that the human speech organs can produce, and, because of allophony, the number of distinct phonemes will generally be smaller than the number of identifiably different sounds. Different languages vary considerably in the number of phonemes they have in their systems (although apparent variation may sometimes result from the different approaches taken by the linguists doing the analysis). The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as 11 in Rotokas and Pirahã to as many as 141 in !Xũ. [17]
The number of phonemically distinct vowels can be as low as two, as in Ubykh and Arrernte. At the other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus 6 nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation. As regards consonant phonemes, Puinave and the Papuan language Tauade each have just seven, and Rotokas has only six. !Xóõ, on the other hand, has somewhere around 77, and Ubykh 81. [UKT ¶]
The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average.
Some languages, such as French, have no phonemic tone or stress, while Cantonese and several of the Kam–Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobé, has been claimed to have 14, [18] though this is disputed. [19]
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. [UKT ¶]
The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/. [20] [UKT ¶]
UKT 191118: Statements like the above had been very misleading for me. For example: English has two allophones for each of /k/, /t/, and /p/. English k is not Burmese
{ka.}: it is
{hka.}. Similarly English t and p are not Burmese
{ta.} and
{pa.}. They are
{hta.} and
{hpa.}. Moreover, what English calls voiceless consonant is made up of two: tenuis voiceless (tenuis) and ordinary voiceless (voiceless). Bur-Myan does not have aspirates. Most Bur-Myan speakers cannot pronounce English sk , st , sp . To correct the situation I have to come up with special consonants, which may be called semi-basic consonants such as
{Ska.} ,
{Sta.} ,
{Spa.} .
Relatively few languages lack any of these consonants, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian lacks /t/, Mohawk and Tlingit lack /p/ and /m/, Hupa lacks both /p/ and a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/.
During the development of phoneme theory in the mid-20th century phonologists were concerned not only with the procedures and principles involved in producing a phonemic analysis of the sounds of a given language, but also with the reality or uniqueness of the phonemic solution. [UKT ¶]
Some writers took the position expressed by Kenneth Pike: "There is only one accurate phonemic analysis for a given set of data", [21] while others believed that different analyses, equally valid, could be made for the same data. Yuen Ren Chao (1934), in his article "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems" [22] stated "given the sounds of a language, there are usually more than one possible way of reducing them to a set of phonemes, and these different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes". The linguist F.W. Householder referred to this argument within linguistics as "God's Truth vs. hocus-pocus". [23] Different analyses of the English vowel system may be used to illustrate this. The article English phonology states that "English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes" and that "there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 20–21 in Australian English"; the present article (§ Numbers of phonemes in different languages) says that "the English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes". Although these figures are often quoted as a scientific fact, they actually reflect just one of many possible analyses, and later in the English Phonology article an alternative analysis is suggested in which some diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to either /j/ or /w/. The transcription system for British English (RP) devised by the phonetician Geoff Lindsey and used in the CUBE pronunciation dictionary also treats diphthongs as composed of a vowel plus /j/ or /w/. [24] The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager and Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/, /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for rhotic accents), each thus comprising two phonemes: they wrote "The conclusion is inescapable that the complex nuclei consist each of two phonemes, one of the short vowels followed by one of three glides". [25] The transcription for the vowel normally transcribed /aɪ/ would instead be /aj/, /aʊ/ would be /aw/ and /ɑː/ would be /ah/. The consequence of this approach is that English could theoretically have only seven vowel phonemes, which might be symbolized /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, /ʌ/ and /ə/, or even six if schwa were treated as an allophone of /ʌ/ or of other short vowels, a figure that would put English much closer to the average number of vowel phonemes in other languages. [26]
In the same period there was disagreement about the correct basis for a phonemic analysis. The structuralist position was that the analysis should be made purely on the basis of the sound elements and their distribution, with no reference to extraneous factors such as grammar, morphology or the intuitions of the native speaker; this position is strongly associated with Leonard Bloomfield. [27] Zellig Harris claimed that it is possible to discover the phonemes of a language purely by examining the distribution of phonetic segments. [28] Referring to mentalistic definitions of the phoneme, Twaddell (1935) stated "Such a definition is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove." [29] This approach was opposed to that of Edward Sapir, who gave an important role to native speakers' intuitions about where a particular sound or groups of sounds fitted into a pattern. Using English [ŋ] as an example, Sapir argued that, despite the superficial appearance that this sound belongs to a group of nasal consonants, "no naive English-speaking person can be made to feel in his bones that it belongs to a single series with /m/ and /n/. ... It still feels like ŋg". [30] The theory of generative phonology which emerged in the 1960s explicitly rejected the Structuralist approach to phonology and favoured the mentalistic or cognitive view of Sapir. [31] [32]
Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems the written symbols (graphemes) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. [UKT ¶]
UKT 191127: If Phonemes are considered to the basis for Alphabet-Letter system, what about the basis for Abugida-Akshara system? Since the main difference between the two systems is the use of mute Letter, and the pronounceable Akshara. If you use the Virama
{a.þût} - the hallmark of the Abugida-Akshara, and the complimentary idea of the intrinsic vowel of the consonant, one system can easily be changed into another. Based on these considerations, I assert that Kartvelian-Georgian and Bur-Myanmar are closely related. From the IPA transcription of Kartvelian /kɑːrt'viːliːən/, I'm hearing
{kaaþ ve-laín} [taking the rhotic accent out]. I've gone online and have listen to how it is pronounced.
{t} which is identical to Georgian თ "Tan"
ა "An" (Georgian vowel /a/) -- flip over -->(Myanmar vowel-killer sign)
To me, by the shape of the glyphs and by the pronunciations, the similarity is more than accidental
This is most obviously the case when the alphabet was invented with a particular language in mind; for example, the Latin alphabet was devised for Classical Latin, and therefore the Latin of that period enjoyed a near one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in most cases, though the devisers of the alphabet chose not to represent the phonemic effect of vowel length. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example.
The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters (digraph, trigraph, etc.), like <sh> in English or <sch> in German (both representing phonemes /ʃ/). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as in English <x> representing /gz/ or /ks/. There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of <c> in Italian) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from the spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are known.
Sign language phonemes are bundles of articulation features. Stokoe was the first scholar to describe the phonemic system of ASL. He identified the bundles tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), dez (the handshape, from designator), sig (the motion, from signation). Some researchers also discern ori (orientation), facial expression or mouthing. Just as with spoken languages, when features are combined, they create phonemes. As in spoken languages, sign languages have minimal pairs which differ in only one phoneme. For instance, the ASL signs for father and mother differ minimally with respect to location while handshape and movement are identical; location is thus contrastive.
Stokoe's terminology and notation sytem are no longer used by researchers to describe the phonemes of sign languages; William Stokoe's research, while still considered seminal, has been found not to characterize American Sign Language or other sign languages sufficiently. [33] For instance, non-manual features are not included in Stokoe's classification. More sophisticated models of sign language phonology have since been proposed by Brentari, [34] Sandler, [35] and van der Kooij. [36]
Cherology and chereme (from Ancient Greek: χείρ "hand") are synonyms of phonology and phoneme previously used in the study of sign languages. A chereme, as the basic unit of signed communication, is functionally and psychologically equivalent to the phonemes of oral languages, and has been replaced by that term in the academic literature. Cherology, as the study of cheremes in language, is thus equivalent to phonology. The terms are not in use anymore. Instead, the terms phonology and phoneme (or distinctive feature) are used to stress the linguistic similarities between signed and spoken languages. [37]
The terms were coined in 1960 by William Stokoe [38] at Gallaudet University to describe sign languages as true and full languages. Once a controversial idea, the position is now universally accepted in linguistics. Stokoe's terminology, however, has been largely abandoned. [39]
UKT: End of Wiki article on Phoneme
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