Allophone
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 16/01/2019

Allophone, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1834 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Phonetics
#Phonology
Allophone

In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , "állos", "other" and , "phōnē", "voice, sound") is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds, or "phones", or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, (as in "stop" ) and (as in "Letter ") are allophones for the phoneme in English, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in Spanish. On the other hand (as in "dolor" ) and (as in "nada" ) are allophones for the phoneme in Spanish, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.

The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible.

Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as a single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes.

The term "allophone" was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory. The term was popularized by George L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition.

Whenever a user's speech is vocalized for a given phoneme, it is slightly different from other utterances, even for the same speaker. That has led to some debate over how real and how universal phonemes really are (see phoneme for details). Only some of the variation is significant, by being detectable or perceivable, to speakers.

There are two types of allophones, based on whether a phoneme must be p...