(linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
Used in a Sentence
phoneme
How to use phoneme in a sentence. Example sentences and definitions for phoneme.
Editorial note
Why would the first language develop the most phonemes, and then lose them as people migrate out of the area?
Examples12
Definitions1
Parts of speech1
Quick take
(linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of phoneme gathered in one view.
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for phoneme.
noun
(linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
Example sentences
Why would the first language develop the most phonemes, and then lose them as people migrate out of the area?
Theoretically one could account for this as edit distance in phoneme space...
2-3 per phoneme, or many more?Also - I'd be curious how much the phoneme in a word can vary based on accent.
I wish to know more about the "voice-to-phoneme" compressor he mentions.
Historical change shows lots of instances of new phoneme generation in languages.
It consists of listening to several native speakers produce the phonemes in question and being quizzed on which phoneme is used in each case.
"He analysed the number of phonemes found in 504 world languages, and hypothesized that languages with the most phonemes were the oldest.
The reality is more complicated because Japanese only has one liquid phoneme.
Orthographic <j> in English represents the affricate /d/, which is unambiguously a phoneme in English.
In English, these two articulations are perceived as the same phoneme; I assume that some language somewhere differentiates between them.
That’s not possible - so in speech recognition, they only keep samples of phonemes, and try to find the most likely concatenation of them relative to the unknown sample.
There must be some kind of confidence metric at the end of the process, but I don't think it's possible to tell how much of the ambiguity comes from inadequacies in the phoneme model, or the audio environment, or the language model.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use phoneme in a sentence?
Why would the first language develop the most phonemes, and then lose them as people migrate out of the area?
What does phoneme mean?
(linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
What part of speech is phoneme?
phoneme is commonly used as noun.