Phonetics

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Phonetics (pronounced /fntks/, from the Greek: , phn, 'sound, voice') is a

branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, orin the
case of sign languagesthe equivalent aspects of sign.[1] It is concerned with the physical
properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic
properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other
hand, is concerned with the abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds or
signs.
The field of phonetics is a multilayered subject of linguistics that focuses on speech. In the
case of oral languages there are three basic areas of study:

Articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds by the

articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker.

Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical transmission of speech sounds from
the speaker to the listener.

Auditory phonetics: the study of the reception and perception of speech sounds by
the listener.

These areas are inter-connected through the common mechanism of sound, such as
wavelength (pitch), amplitude, and harmonics.
Contents
[hide]

1 History

2 Relation to phonology

3 Subfields

4 Transcription

5 Applications

6 See also

7 Notes

8 References

9 Archives

10 External links

History[edit]
Phonetics was studied as early as the 3rd century BC in the Indian subcontinent,
with Pnini's account of the place andmanner of articulation of consonants in his treatise
on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according
to Pnini's classification.
Modern phonetics begins with attemptssuch as those of Joshua Steele (in Prosodia
Rationalis, 1779) and Alexander Melville Bell (in Visible Speech, 1867)to introduce
systems of precise notation for speech sounds.[2][3]
The study of phonetics grew quickly in the late 19th century partly due to the invention of
phonograph, which allowed the speech signal to be recorded. Phoneticians were able to
replay the speech signal several times and apply acoustic filters to the signal. In doing so,
one was able to more carefully deduce the acoustic nature of the speech signal.
Using an Edison phonograph, Ludimar Hermann investigated the spectral properties of
vowels and consonants. It was in these papers that the term formant was first introduced.
Hermann also played vowel recordings made with the Edison phonograph at different
speeds in order to test Willis', and Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.

Relation to phonology[edit]
In contrast to phonetics, phonology is the study of how sounds and gestures pattern in and
across languages, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of language.
Phonetics deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds, how they
are produced, and how they are perceived. As part of this investigation, phoneticians may
concern themselves with the physical properties of meaningful sound contrasts or the
social meaning encoded in the speech signal (socio-phonetics)
(e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.). However, a substantial portion of research in
phonetics is not concerned with the meaningful elements in the speech signal.
While it is widely agreed that phonology is grounded in phonetics, phonology is a distinct
branch of linguistics, concerned with sounds and gestures as abstract units (e.g., distinctive
features, phonemes, mora, syllables, etc.) and their conditioned variation (via,
e.g., allophonic rules, constraints, or derivational rules).[4] Phonology relates to phonetics via
the set ofdistinctive features, which map the abstract representations of speech units to
articulatory gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations. [5][6][7]

Subfields[edit]
Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:

articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position,

shape, and movement of articulators orspeech organs, such as the lips, tongue,
and vocal folds.

acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The spectro-temporal

properties of the sound wavesproduced by speech, such as their frequency, amplitude,
and harmonic structure.

auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception:

the perception, categorization, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of
the auditory system and the brain in the same.

Transcription[edit]
Main article: Phonetic transcription
Phonetic transcription is a system for transcribing sounds that occur in a language,
whether oral or sign. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription,
the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), provides a standardized set of symbols for oral
phones.[8][9] The standardized nature of the IPA enables its users to transcribe accurately
and consistently the phones of different languages, dialects, and idiolects.[8][10][11] The IPA is a
useful tool not only for the study of phonetics, but also for language teaching, professional
acting, and speech pathology.[10]

Applications[edit]
Applications of phonetics include:

forensic phonetics: the use of phonetics (the science of speech) for forensic (legal)
purposes.

Speech Recognition: the analysis and transcription of recorded speech by a

computer system.

See also[edit]

Experimental phonetics

Index of phonetics articles

International Phonetic Alphabet

Speech processing

Acoustics

Biometric word list

Phonetics departments at universities

X-SAMPA

ICAO spelling alphabet

Buckeye Corpus

SaypU (Spell As You Pronounce Universally)

Notes[edit]
1.

Jump up^ O'Grady (2005) p.15

2.

Jump up^ T.V.F. Brogan: English Versification, 15701980. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1981. E394.

3.

Jump up^ Alexander Melville Bell 1819-1905 . University at Buffalo, The State
University of New York.

4.

Jump up^ Kingston, John. 2007. The Phonetics-Phonology Interface, in The

Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (ed. Paul DeLacy), Cambridge University Press.

5.

Jump up^ Halle, Morris. 1983. On Distinctive Features and their articulatory
implementation, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, p. 91 - 105

6.

Jump up^ Jakobson, Roman, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. 1976.
Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and their Correlates, MIT
Press.

7.

Jump up^ Hall, T. Allen. 2001. Phonological representations and phonetic

implementation of distinctive features, Mouton de Gruyter.

8.

^ Jump up to:a b O'Grady (2005) p.17

9.

Jump up^ International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the

International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press.

10.

^ Jump up to:a b Ladefoged, Peter (1975) A Course in Phonetics. Orlando:

Harcourt Brace. 5th ed. Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth 2006.

11.

Jump up^ Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson (1996) The Sounds of the
Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

References[edit]

O'Grady, William, et al. (2005). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (5th ed.).

Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-41936-8.

Stearns, Peter; Adas, Michael; Schwartz, Stuart; Gilbert, Marc Jason (2001). World
Civilizations (3rd ed.). New York: Longman. ISBN 9780321044792.

Archives[edit]

Audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with
phonetic transcriptions, with scans of original field notes where relevant: UCLA
Phonetics Laboratory Archive http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?
ark=21198/zz0008nkk5

External links[edit]

the Web Site of the Phonetic Sciences Laboratory of the Universit de Montral.

The International Society of Phonetic Sciences (ISPhS)

A little encyclopedia of phonetics, Peter Roach, Professor of Phonetics, University
of Reading, UK. (pdf)

The sounds and sound patterns of language U Penn

IPA handbook

Real-time MRI video of the articulation of speech sounds, from the USC Speech
Articulation and kNowledge (SPAN) Group

Extensive collection of phonetics resources on the Web (University of North

Carolina)

Phonetics and Phonology (University of Osnabrck)

Phoneme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the speech unit. For the JavaME library, see phoneME.
A phoneme is a basic unit of a language's phonology, which is combined with other
phonemes to form meaningful units such as words or morphemes. The phoneme can be
described as "The smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of
meaning".[1] In this way the difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is
a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/. Two words that differ in
meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair.
Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a
given language should be analyzed inphonemic (or phonematic) terms. However, a
phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech
sounds (phones) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For
example, in English, the "k" sounds in the words kit and skill are not identical (as
described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme /k/. Different
speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones.
Allophonic variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a
certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may be free in which case it
may vary randomly. In this way, phonemes are often considered to constitute an
abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up
the corresponding phonetic realization, or surface form.
Contents
[hide]

1 Notation

2 Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes

o

2.1 Minimal pairs

3 Other features with phonemic status

4 Distribution of allophones

5 Background and related ideas

6 Restrictions on occurrence

7 Biuniqueness

8 Neutralization and archiphonemes

9 Morphophonemes

10 Numbers of phonemes in different languages

11 Correspondence between letters and phonemes

12 Phonemes in sign languages

13 See also

14 Notes

15 Bibliography

Notation[edit]
Phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech
sounds (phones) are placed between square brackets. Thus /p/ represents a sequence
of three phonemes /p/, //, // (the word push in standard English), while [p] represents
the phonetic sequence of sounds [p] (aspirated "p"), [], [] (the usual pronunciation
ofpush).(Another similar convention is the use of angle brackets to enclose the units
of orthography, namely graphemes; for example, f represents the written letter
(grapheme) f.)
The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA), the same set of symbols that are most commonly used for phones. (For
computer typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA andKirshenbaum exist to represent
IPA symbols in plain text.) However descriptions of particular languages may use different
conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages
whose writing systems employ thephonemic 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 phonemesbelow).

Assignment of speech sounds to phonemes[edit]

A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes

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, school, skill. Although most native speakers do not
notice this, in most English dialects the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical:
in cat and kit the sound isaspirated, while in school and skill it is unaspirated (listen to U.S.
pronunciations of kit (helpinfo) and skill (helpinfo)). The words therefore contain
different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [k] for the aspirated form, [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 [k] 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] and [k] are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. In
some languages, however, [k] and[k] are perceived by native speakers as different
sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word; this means
that in those languages, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example,
in Icelandic, [k] is the first sound of ktur meaning "cheerful", while [k] is the first sound
of gtur meaning "riddles". Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /k/ and /k/.

Minimal pairs[edit]
A pair of words like ktur and gtur (above) that differ only in one phone is called a minimal
pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, [k] 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. To take another example, the minimal
pair tip anddip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate
phonemes, /t/ and /d/; since these two words have different meanings, English speakers
must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds. In other languages, though,
including Korean, even though both sounds [t] and [d] occur, no such minimal pair exists.
The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing [t] and [d] in Korean provides evidence that in this
language 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, whereas an English speaker would perceive
different sounds in these two locations.
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 too dissimilar phonetically for it to be
likely that speakers perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no
minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in hat) and [] (as in bang), and the fact that they can be
shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for them 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 // from //, yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are
distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' /pre/ and 'pleasure' /ple/ can serve as a
near minimal pair.[3]

Other features with phonemic status[edit]

While phonemes are normally conceived of as abstractions of discrete segmental speech
sounds (vowels and consonants), there are other features of pronunciation
principally tone and stress which in some languages can change the meaning of words in
the way that phoneme contrasts do, and are consequently called phonemic features of
those languages.
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, and therefore a full phonemic specification
(providing enough detail to enable the word to be pronounced unambiguously) would
include indication of the position of the stress: /nvat/ for the verb, /nvat/ 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. For example, the character
(pronounced m, high level pitch) means "mom", (m, rising pitch) means "hemp",
(m, falling then rising) means "horse", (m, falling) means "scold", and (ma, neutral
tone) is aninterrogative particle. 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.

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 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.

Background and related ideas[edit]

The term phonme (from Ancient Greek phnma, "sound made, utterance"[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
Niecisaw Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikoaj Kruszewski during 18751895.
[5]
The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they
called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works
of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and others of the Prague School (during the years 19261935), 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[6][7]
Later, it was used and redefined in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam
Chomsky and Morris Halle,[8] 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.[9]
Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle) proposed that phonemes may
be further decomposable intofeatures, such features being the true minimal constituents of
language.[10] Features overlap each other in time, as dosuprasegmental 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,[11] Chomsky and
Halle used a predominantlyarticulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features,
while Ladefoged's system[12] 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. Not all scholars working on such languages use
these terms, which may be considered 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.[13]

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 arephonotactic 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. Examples of
such restrictions in English include:

//, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many
other languages, such as Mori,Swahili, Tagalog, and Thai, // can appear wordinitially).

/h/ occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a
few languages, such as Arabic, orRomanian allow /h/ syllable-finally).

In many American dialects with the cotcaught merger, // occurs only

before /r/ and /l/ (and in the diphthong [] if this is not interpreted as a single
phoneme).

In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word
or 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 /bj/).

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.
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 [] (analveolar 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.

Neutralization and archiphonemes[edit]

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. 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. Anarchiphoneme 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 stressedsyllables, but in unstressed syllables the contrast is
lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [] (for details, see Vowel reduction
in Russian). In order to assign such an instance of [] 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 whichinflectional 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 [] 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, /.
In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by the minimal
triplet sum /sm/, sun /sn/, sung /s/. 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 // before /k/, as in limp, lint,
link ( /lmp/, /lnt/, /lk/). 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 |lNp|, |lNt|, |lNk|.
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-|, {m,
n, }, 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 beddingmight both be
pronounced [b], and if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, it would be
necessary to look for morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related
forms bet and bed, for example) in order to determine which phoneme the flap represents.
As in the previous examples, some 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|.
For a special kind of neutralization proposed in generative phonology, see absolute
neutralization.

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 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).

Numbers of phonemes in different languages[edit]

A given language will 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 Pirah to as many as 141 in !X.[14]
The number of phonemically distinct vowels can be as low as two, as in Ubyx and Arrernte.
At the other extreme, the Bantulanguage 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 !X achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional
variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation. As
regards consonant phonemes, Puinave has just seven, and Rotokas has only six. !X, on
the other hand, has somewhere around 77, and Ubyx 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.
Some languages, such as French, have no phonemic tone or stress, while several of
the KamSui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe, has been
claimed to have 14, though this is disputed.
The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most
common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/. 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 Samoanlacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/.

Correspondence between letters and phonemes[edit]

Main article: Phonemic orthography
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. 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 someloanwords),
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 //). Also a single letter may represent two
phonemes, as the Cyrilic letter in some positions. 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.

Phonemes in sign languages[edit]

In sign languages, the basic elements of gesture and location were formerly
called cheremes or cheiremes but they are now generally referred to as phonemes, as with
oral languages.
Sign language phonemes are combinations of articulation bundles in ASL. These bundles
may be classified as tab(elements of location, from Latin tabula), dez (the hand shape,
from designator), sig (the motion, from signation), and with some
researchers, ori (orientation). Facial expression and mouthing are also considered
articulation bundles. Just as with spoken languages, when these bundles are combined,
they create phonemes.
Stokoe notation is no longer used by researchers to denote the phonemes of sign
languages; his research, while still considered seminal, has been found to not describe
American Sign Language and cannot be used interchangeable with other signed
languages. Originally developed for American Sign Language, it has also been applied
to British Sign Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by
Adam Kendon. Other sign notations, such as the Hamburg Notation
System and SignWriting, are phonetic scripts capable of writing any sign language.
Stokoe's work has been succeeded and improved upon by researcher Scott Liddell in his
book Grammar, Gesture and Meaning, and both Stokoe and Liddell's work have been
included in the Linguistics of American Sign Language, 5th Edition