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In phonetics (a branch of linguistics), a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another.
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. [1] Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians.
The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, 'voice, sound', and the suffix -logy (which is from Greek λόγος, lógos, 'word, speech, subject of discussion'). Phonology is typically distinguished from phonetics, which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds or signs of language.
A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic phonological or morphophonological process in linguistics.Phonological rules are commonly used in generative phonology as a notation to capture sound-related operations and computations the human brain performs when producing or comprehending spoken language.
For example, in many varieties of American English, the phoneme /t/ in a word like wet can surface either as an unreleased stop [t̚] or as a flap [ɾ], depending on environment: [wɛt] wet vs. [ˈwɛɾɚ] wetter. (In both cases, however, the underlying representation of the morpheme wet is the same: its phonemic form /wɛt/.)
The phonetic environment of a phone can sometimes determine the allophonic or phonemic qualities of a sound in a given language. For example, the English vowel sound [æ], traditionally called the short A , in a word like mat (phonetically [mæt]), has the consonant [m] preceding it and the consonant [t] following it, while the [æ] itself is ...
Classes are defined by distinctive features having reference to articulatory and acoustic phonetic properties, [2] including manners of articulation, places of articulation, voicing, and continuance. For example, the set containing the sounds /p/, /t/, and /k/ is a natural class of voiceless stops in American Standard English.