Talk:Diphone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In this context does "phones" mean the same thing as "phoneme"? There is an entry for phoneme but not for a phone. What do you all think? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.42.208.182 (talk • contribs) 01:13, 4 June 2004

In this context, the subsitution wouldn’t be a huge problem, no. But ‘phone’ does not mean ‘phoneme’. Phones are simply (speech) sounds, whereas phonemes are a particular theoretical construct that groups phones into categories which are considered non-distinct from the perspective of the language. So the phoneme /t/ can be realised with one of a number of phones in (some dialects of) English: [t] in ‘step’; [tʰ] in ‘ten’; [ʔ͡t̚] in ‘bet’; [ɾ] in ‘better’. Or in Australian English there’s two phones [ɔ̟ʉ] and [ɔu] which are considered to be one phoneme /əʉ/ because the former never occurs before /l/ (unless there’s some boundary between them), and the latter always occurs before /l/ (unless there’s some boundary between them). —Felix the Cassowary 07:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)