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es of pronunciation such as tone and stress syllable boundaries and other forms of juncture nasalization and vowel harmony which in many languages change the meaning of words and so are phonemic phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as english for example there are two words spelled invite one is a verb and is stressed on the second syllable the other is a noun and stressed on the first syllable without changing any of the individual sounds the position of the stress distinguishes the words and so a full phonemic specification 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 so it is not phonemic and therefore 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 the syllable ma with each of the primary tones in standard mandarin chinese minimal set for phonemic tone in mandarin chinese tone number 1 2 3 4 5 hanzi 媽 麻 馬 罵 嗎 pinyin mā má mǎ mà ma ipa ma ́ ma ̌ ma ̀ c ma ̂ ma gloss mother hemp horse scold question particle the tone phonemes in such languages are sometimes called tonemes languages such as english do not have phonemic tone but they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude distribution of allophones edit 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 that 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 but allophones are still selected in a specific phonetic context not the other way around background and related ideas edit the term phonème from ancient greek φώνημα romanized phōnēma sound made utterance thing spoken speech language 7 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 baudouin de courtenay and his student mikołaj kruszewski during 1875 1895 8 the term used by these two was fonema the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics 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 9 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 10 11 later the term was used and redefined in generative linguistics most famously by noam chomsky and morris halle 12 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 13 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 14 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 15 chomsky and halle used a predominantly articulatory basis though retaining some acoustic features while ladefoged s system 16 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 17 restrictions on occurrence edit main article phonotactics 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 in english examples of such restrictions include the following ŋ as in si ng occurs only at the end of a syllable never at the beginning in many other languages such as māori swahili tagalog thai and setswana ŋ can appear word initially h occurs only at the beginning of a syllable never at the end a few languages such as arabic and romanian allow h syllable finally in non rhotic dialects ɹ can occur immediately only 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 in which 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 edit 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 citation needed 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 hi tt ing and bi dd ing although it is intended to realize the phoneme t in the first word and d in the second this appears to contradict biuniqueness original research for further discussion of such cases see the next section neutralization and archiphonemes edit this section needs more citations please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources unsourced material may be challenged and removed find sources phoneme news newspapers books scholar jstor may 2019 learn how and when to remove this message 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 18 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 or a o reflecting its unmerged values d 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 phonemes 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 double virgules or pipes as with the examples a and n given above other ways the second of these has been notated include m n ŋ m n ŋ and 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 19 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 further mergers in english are plosives after s where p t k conflate with b d ɡ as suggested by the alternative spellings sketti and sghetti that is there is no particular reason to transcribe spin as ˈspɪn rather than as ˈsbɪn other than its historical development and it might be less ambiguously transcribed ˈsbɪn morphophonemes edit main article morphophonology 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 be a single morphophoneme which might be transcribed for example z or z and which is realized phonemically as s after most voiceless consonants as in cat s and as z in other cases as in dog s numbers of phonemes in different languages edit 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 9 11 in pirahã and 11 in rotokas to as many as 141 in ǃxũ 20 21 22 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 six 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 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 across all languages the average number of consonant phonemes per language is about 22 while the average number of vowel phonemes is about 8 23 some languages such as french have no phonemic tone or stress while cantonese and several of the kam sui languages have six to nine tones depending on how they are counted and the kam sui dong language has nine to 15 tones by the same measure one of the kru languages wobé has been claimed to have 14 24 though this is disputed 25 the most common vowel system consists of the five vowels i e a o u 26 27 28 languages with a five vowel system span across the globe and throughout unrelated language families some of the most notable five vowel languages are spanish 29 serbo croatian 30 hebrew 31 tagalog 32 hawaiian 33 and japanese the most common consonants are p t k m n 34 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 non uniqueness of phonemic solutions edit 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 these were central concerns of phonology some writers took the position expressed by kenneth pike there is only one accurate phonemic analysis for a given set of data 35 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 36 stated that 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...
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