Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
What is the difference between Phonemes and Allophones?
I need to know this for an upcoming exam, and this is what I think I know about them so far:
Phoneme: Smallest contrastive unit in the sound system. It's the smallest past of an utterance (so, in a nutshell, a single sound in a word, right?) and you can't change it, because otherwise you might change the meaning on the entire word.
Allophone: The realization of a phoneme. Basically, every person pronounces every phoneme a little different each time and you can't copy the exact sound you've made before.
The problem emerging from this is that they are obviously different in the way they are used in Phonetics, but I would personally classify an allophone as a sub-category of a phoneme. It seems to me that the only difference is that an allophone is the realization of the phoneme, which is rather theoretical then. But I wouldn't actually compare these things with each other, it would be as if I compared the photograph of something to a real thing, claiming that the difference is that I can use a real chair, but look stupid if I tried to use photographed furniture.
Am I missing or misunderstandding something?
1 Answer
- ۞۞Lv 58 years agoFavorite Answer
You understand part of it, but can use a little clarification. Differences in the way we hold our tongue or if we open up the nasal cavity or put our lips together, as well as some other things, determine the sound that we produce. Pronounce the sounds m and b and you'll see that they're surprisingly similar - the only difference being that when we you say m, you let some air pass through your nose. Okay, so any particular way of producing a sound results in a PHONE. So m and b are different phones because there is a difference in their production.
Now imagine that there are two phones that, in your language, you don't hear a difference. English has numerous examples - one is the clear L and the dark L. Pronounce the words 'light' and 'pull' and notice that in the second word, the back of your tongue goes up when you pronounce the L, but it doesn't when you say the first word. The L in pull is called the dark L.
In some languages, you would have two words where the choice of these phones results in a different meaning. But in English, you would never have such a case. Try to pronounce 'light' with the back of your tongue raised for L - and then 'pull' without raising your tongue. It sounds funny, but you don't hear a different word. So in English, since these two sounds are indistinguishable, they are allophones - they're perceived as the same sound. The abstract category that two or more allophones belong to is called a phoneme.
Think of a comparison - if you see the letter (the symbol) <a> written in another font, or in italics, or capitalized, you still interpret it as the letter a - even though you can see that there is a difference. It's sort of the same for different allophones. The different ways of writing a are like allophones, but the category of the letter 'a' is like a phoneme.
Good luck.