Phonemes, allophones, phones

Consider the following quantitative questions:

1. Which language has more speech sounds, English or German?
2. How many sounds does German have?
3. How many sounds does English have?

These questions appear to be very simple, but even a native speaker of a language does not as a rule have this kind of knowledge about their language. In fact, the questions are extremely hard to answer.

Clearly, a language professional needs this kind of knowledge, if only in order to be able to plan pronunciation teaching courses.

Now consider the possible strategies for answering this question. An effective strategy is `divide and rule', for instance to ask the following questions:

1. How many kinds of speech sound are there?
2. Starting with the distinction between Consonants and Vowels, into how many subclasses can you divide these into subclasses according to their phonetic properties?

Tasks:

1. Make a table in your Word document listing all the essential phonetic properties of speech sounds (e.g. with Consonant and Vowel types in the columns, and Places of Articulation in the rows);
2. Make a second copy of the table.
3. Using one table for German and one for English, enter the speech sounds into the table.
4. Now count the speech sounds and answer the initial questions ...
5. And now check the web and your introductory textbooks to find definitions of the different kinds of speech sound - consonant, vowel, obstruent, plosive, affricate, fricative, ...

Phonemes

You all have an intuitive notion of what a typical speech sound for a given language is. There is a technical term for this concept of speech sound: phoneme. Check the web for a definition of the term phoneme.

Allophones

You know from your phonetic analyses that the same sound can be produced in very different ways, depending on the context.

The technical term for a variant production of a speech sound is allophone.

Check the web for a definition of the term allophone.

Levels of description: phonetics and phonology

The apparent contradiction that the sounds you are very familiar with are sound very different in reality is resolved by distinguishing between two types or levels of description of speech sounds:

1. Phonology
2. Phonetics

Task:

Search the web for definitions of these two terms.