segmental phoneme

I. Introduction

Segment (linguistics)

In linguistics (specifically, phonetics and phonology),  the term segment is "any discrete unit that can be identified,  either physically or   auditorily,    in the stream of speech.

Classifying speech units

Segments are called "discrete" because they are separate and individual, such as consonants and vowels, and occur in a distinct temporal order. Other units, such as tone, stress, and sometimes secondary articulations such as nasalization, may coexist with multiple segments and cannot be discretely ordered with them. These elements are termed suprasegmental.

Kinds of segment

The segments of sign language are visual, such as hands, movements, face, and body. They occur in a distinct spatial and temporal order. The SignWriting script represents the spatial order of the segments with a spatial cluster of graphemes. Other notations for sign language use a temporal order that implies a spatial order.  In phonetics, the smallest perceptible segment is a phone.  In phonology, there is a subfield of segmental phonology that deals with the analysis of speech into phonemes (or segmental phonemes), which correspond fairly well to phonetic segments of the analysed speech.

Marginal segments

When analyzing the inventory of segmental units in any given language, some segments will be found to be marginal, in the sense that they are only found in onomatopoeic words, interjections, loan words, or a very limited number of ordinary words, but not throughout the language. Marginal segments, especially in loan words, are often the source of new segments in the general inventory of a language. This appears to have been the case with English /ʒ/, which originally only occurred in French loans.

Suprasegmentals

Some phonemes cannot be easily analyzed as distinct segments, but rather belong to a syllable or even word. Such "suprasegmentals" include tone, stress, and prosody. In some languages, nasality or vowel harmony is suprasegmental.

II. Discussion  about comparing phonemes

Serbian orthography

Rephrasing to avoid saying that the Serbo-Croatian orthography is perfectly phonemic; it's not, as it fails to represent stress, pitch, and length on vowels.

/buts/

A sound that is a single phoneme in one language may be a , /buts/ means leg-covering footwear in English and consists of four phonemes /b u t s/; but in Hebrew it means a kind of cloth and consists of only three phonemes /b u ts/.     In fact, /ts/ in English is two phonemes /t/ and /s/, while IIUC Hebrew /t_s/ ("t-s ligature") is one phoneme. It's not the same "thing" interpreted as a phoneme cluster in English and as a single phoneme in Hebrew. The Hebrew sound is an affricate, like English "ch".

Czech r-hacek

Possibly the rarest sound is the one represented by "r hacek" (found in the name Dvorak) in the Czech language;  it appears to be unique to the language.  This sound (ř) is similar or equal to the one of French 'j'. It is also close (and related) to Polish 'rz'. -- AdSR    /ř/ is not equivalent to French /j/; French /j/ is the same as the English /s/ in measure,   Czech has the letter ž for that. /ř/ is similar, but it's rolled.   the Polish rz is closer to the Czech ž than to ř.

 It seemed to me to be /r/ and /ʒ/ articulated simultaneously.

Some Spanish speakers have the r-hacek sound for , although it is nonstandard and not terribly common.

Czech is certainly not the only language to have a phoneme unique to it. Dozens if not hundreds of languages share this property. Czech r-hacek just happens to be the example that is most well-known to Western linguists.

Allophony

The sounds /z/ and /s/ are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. Out of curiosity, what sound environment makes a Spanish speaker say [z]?  It seems like every use of the letter "z" should be pronounced as [s]. Not that spelling and phones/phonemes need to be very intimately related, of course; the main point is Spanish word with a [z] sound.  Maybe it's a feature of some particular pockets of Spanish? -- Ryguasu

What relation does have with /z/ in Spanish? None. is always the phoneme /θ/, with the voiced allophone [ð] before certain voiced consonants. Similarly, is always the phoneme /s/, with the voiced allophone [z] before certain voiced consonants, e.g. /'desde/ ['dezde].

You'll occasionally hear Spanish speakers using the /z/ sound for an S that appears before a voiced consonant in a phrase like ¿Quién es David?,  but certainly never in a word by itself, so it probably isn't a great example of an allophone.

Depends on dialect. There are many allophones of /s/. Most Spanish dialects have two: One at the beginning of syllables, one at the end of syllables. There may be different pronunciations at the ends of words than at the ends of syllables. The syllable-final allophones may be /h/ or /z/ before voiced (as in /desde/, /mismo/, or a lengthening of the previous vowel. Some dialects don't have syllable-final /s/ at all. The majority of the Spanish speakers don't have a distinct /T/ phoneme, but only /s/. If such a dialect voices syllable-final /s/, then may be [z], e.g. in /fe'ros/ [fe'roz].

            German is a better example of [s] and [z] being allophones of /s/. German has both phonemes.   By the way, in some cases z and s are allophones in English (for the plural -- or maybe it is /ez/) Slrubenstein   Right. For example, chairs ends in [z], while cats ends in [s]. -- Ryguasu

Allophones or allomorphs?   Yes, those are allomorphs. A better example of allophones in English would be the aspirated T at the beginning of "tip" and the non-aspirated T at the end of "pit", which English treats as the same sound in all contexts.  

Isn't it more than a bit confusing to say phonemes aren't sounds, and then in a section like this refer to them as sounds?   Yet /s/ and /z/ were allophones in Old English (at least in the Early West Saxon dialect). The /z/ allophone only being used when /s/ appeared in medial position.

How many points of articulation used?

Surely Dyirbal doesn't have the most places of articulation?  Ubykh, for instance, contrasts voiceless fricatives in labiodental, alveolar, postalveolar, alveolopalatal,  retroflex,  velar, uvular and glottal classes: fa to eat, sa sword, ʂa head, ʃa arrow, ɕa three, xa testis, χa to knit, haj no, and there is an additional bilabial class not represented in the fricatives.

English has 40 phonemes

English has 24 consonants including affricates and excluding foreign sounds such as /x/. It has 12 simple vowels and 8 diphthongs. Of course, not everyone speaks like this. Where I'm from, /h/ is deleted, /θ/ becomes [f] and /ð/ becomes [v].   But "English" without adjectives means "standard English".    It seems like a good indicator that this concept of the phoneme is getting at something that is at the sub-lexical and even sub-syllabic level of language,  but for various reasons the concept is flawed--therefore,  there will never be any agreements as to the exact phoneme inventories of a given language are.  If one key issue in language is to account for invariance across all that variation,  the phoneme comes up well short.

The entire thing needs re-written. The term refers to a set of concepts of historic interest to linguistics and phonology but is now largely obsolete.  That is because research has failed to find support for most conceptions of the phoneme in articulation, in acoustics and in speech perception.  It now seems more likely to be an artifact of writing systems.  To word it differently, if you try to set down dynamic speech in static units at a sub-syllabic level, you get things like phonemes and features.  That is the sort of analysis you have to rely on to write a language.  But there might be very little or nothing of this in the actual human psychology of language.  Interestingly enough, the one hope for retaining some sort of psychological or metalinguistic concept of the phoneme comes from reading acquisition of an alphabetic language--that is the current talk of 'phonemic awareness' in beginning literacy (which goes way way back to a Soviet research Elkonen).

III. References

·      A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, David Crystal, 2003, pp. 408–409

·      David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, Blackwell, 2003.

·      Carlos Gussenhoven & Haike Jacobs, "Understanding Phonology", Hodder & Arnold, 1998. 2nd edition 2005