Fonem

Krogit e-barzh !
Un danvez pennad eo ar pennad-mañ ha labour zo d'ober c'hoazh a-raok e beurechuiñ.
Gallout a rit skoazellañ Wikipedia dre glokaat anezhañ.

Er yezhoniezh e vez implijet an termen fonemenn (saoz.: phoneme) war dachenn ar fonologiezh evit komz eus

In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. It is a sound of a language as represented (or imagined) without reference to its position in a word or phrase. A phoneme, therefore, is the conception of a sound in the most neutral form possible and distinguishes between different words or morphemes — changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense.

Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them. A phoneme could be thought of as a family of related phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being categorically the same and differing only in the phonetic environment in which they occur.

A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only in the phones in question.

The term phonème was reportedly first used by Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it referred to only a sound of speech. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875-1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and other of the Prague School (during the years 1926-1935), as well as in that of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. Later, it was also used in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, and remains central in any accounts of the development of virtually all modern schools of phonology.

The phoneme can be defined as "the smallest meaningful psychological unit of sound." The phoneme has mental, physiological, and physical substance: our brains process the sounds; the sounds are produced by the human speech organs; and the sounds are physical entities that can be recorded and measured.

For an example of phonemes, consider the English words pat and sat, which appear to differ only in their initial consonants. This difference, known as contrastiveness or opposition, is sufficient to distinguish these words, and therefore the P and S sounds are said to be different phonemes in English. A pair of words that are identical except for such a sound are known as a minimal pair; this is the most frequent demonstration that two sounds are separate phonemes.

If no minimal pair can be found to demonstrate that two sounds are distinct, it may be that they are allophones. Allophones are variant phones (i.e., sounds) that are not recognized as distinct by a speaker, and are not meaningfully different in the language, and so are perceived as "the same". This is especially likely if they consistently occur in different environments. For example, the "dark" L sound at the end of the English word "wool" is quite different from the "light" L sound at the beginning of the word "leaf", but this difference is meaningless in English, and is determined by whether the sound is at the beginning or end of a word. A native English speaker might have a hard time hearing the difference at first, but in Turkish the difference between "light" and "dark" L is sufficient to distinguish words. That is, they are two separate phonemes in Turkish, but allophones of a single phoneme in English.

The phonemic relationship of two sounds may not be obvious to a non-native speaker, which is why minimal pairs and an understanding of phonetic environments are important. For example, in Korean, there is a phoneme /r/ that is a flapped r between vowels, and is an l-sound in other phonetic contexts. These sounds are very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native Korean speaker has learned from an early age to consider the two sounds the same. Thus, Korean speakers do not differentiate the two words "ram" and "lamb", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language.

Some languages make use of pitch for phonemic distinction. In this case, the tones used are called tonemes. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes (and tonemes) by using different durations of some elements, which are called chronemes. However, not all scholars working on languages with distinctive duration use this term.

A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a language is said to be phonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ].

The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as /f/. In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound /f/. Allophones, more phonetically specific descriptions of how a given phoneme might be commonly instantiated, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of angle brackets < > to enclose the spelling.

See also