What is a phoneme? How do I count the phonemes in a word (for example, trail)?

Answer 1

A phoneme is a individual sound that a letter makes. trail has four phonemes. t - r- ai- l
the ai is two letters but only makes one sound.

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
What is a phoneme? How do I count the phonemes in a word (for example, trail)?

Answer 3

You don't need wikipedia for that. The definition of a phoneme allows you to find the phonemes of any language: A phoneme is the smallest sound unit of language that distuinguishes meaning. If you can find a pair of words in a language whose meaning is different and which only differ in one sound, these respective sounds are phonemes of that language:

trail vs. grail - you have isolated the t-sound (and the g-sound) as an English phoneme
trail vs. tail - you have isolated the r-sound as an English phoneme
trail vs. troll - you have isolated the ai-diphthong (and the ou-diphthong) as an English phoneme
trail vs. train - you have isolated the l-sound (and the n-sound) as an English phoneme.

So there are 4 phonemes in "trail".

I can't type the phoneme symbols according top the IPA here, so I refer to "sounds" in order to make clear that they are not the letters.

Answer 4

4

Answer 5

In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. It is a sound of a language as represented (or imagined) without reference to its position in a word or phrase. A phoneme, therefore, is the conception of a sound in the most neutral form possible and distinguishes between different words or morphemes — changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense.

Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them. A phoneme could be thought of as a family of related phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being categorically the same and differing only in the phonetic environment in which they occur.

In sign languages, the basic movements were formerly called cheremes (or cheiremes), but usage changed to phoneme when it was recognized that the mental abstractions involved are essentially the same as in oral languages.

A phonemically "perfect" alphabet is one that has a single symbol for each phoneme. See Phonemic orthography.

Although the concept has been fundamental to the development of phonological analysis of language beneath the level of the syllable, some linguists reject the theoretical validity of the phoneme. Some think that phonemes are more a product of literacy (i.e., the need to categorize the phonetics of a language in order to write it down systematically with a minimum number of letters). Other critics charge that the mind processes sub-phonemic elements of speech (e.g., features) in meaningful ways.

A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only in the phones in question.

Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like /p/ and /b/. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called digraphs, like (pronounced /ʃ/) or (pronounced /tʃ/).

To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English.

Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, /p/ has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in /pɪn/, and non-aspirated as in /spɪn/. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated /pʰ/ is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated /p/. As another example, there is no distinction between [r] and [l] in Japanese, there is only one /r/ phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese /r/ has allophones that make it sound more like an /l/, /d/ (specifically the flapped form [ɾ]), or /r/ to English speakers. The sounds /z/ and /s/ are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. /n/ (as in run) and /ŋ/ (as in rung) are phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish.

An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels).

Answer 6

hat