Re: Japanese learning, is anybody as frustrated as me?

From: Bart Mathias (mathias_at_hawaii.edu)
Date: 12/12/04 

Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 03:26:13 GMT

Travers Naran wrote:
> [...]
> See what my computational linguistics courses get me? :-) That is good
> to know. So the individual sounds are more properly called phones?
> Allophone: doesn't that mean a sound alike?

My casual equation of "phone" and "allophone" was a bit sloppy. You're
right that individual speech sounds are referred to as phones. An
allophone is a "same sound"; it is a phone viewed as a member of a
phoneme (not that there a phoneme has to have more than one "allophone"
in it). In fact, an allophone may contain more than one phone, as for
example the "ch" in English "chat" (we could call it the phoneme /c/ if
we want) contains [t] and [S] in its allophone [tS].

The "emic" versus "etic" distinction is also seen in
morpheme/allomorph/morph. But this may be old-fashioned linguistics
now; I haven't been keeping up, ever since I found Chomsky unconvincing.

Bart

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