Linguistics
Six levels of linguistics
These are my notes on six common ways to break down spoken language. I put them in a circle so I can follow a sentence from sound to context.
01
Phone or phoneme?
A phone is a speech sound we can make and hear. A phoneme is a sound category that a language uses to distinguish words. The cross-language examples below are what helped this click for me.
Hindi
In Hindi varieties that pronounce फल with [pʰ], that small puff of air changes the word’s meaning. Those varieties treat /p/ and /pʰ/ as two phonemes. Some Hindi speakers pronounce this sound closer to [f].
English
English speakers make both sounds too. English does not use this puff of air to distinguish words, so [p] and [pʰ] are two phones grouped under the same phoneme, /p/.
A phone is a physical speech sound. A phoneme is a category in a particular language. If swapping two sounds in the same place can change one word into another, that is good evidence that the language treats them as separate phonemes.
02
Follow a sentence
Select any of the three sentences and pick which level of the circle you want to use to analyze it.
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Phonetics
What did the speaker physically say?
I think of phonetics as the physical side of speech. It covers how a sound is made, how it moves through the air, and how we hear it. For example, I can hold my hand in front of my mouth and feel the puff of air in the p at the start of “pin.” Phonetics gives us a way to describe and measure details like that before we ask whether they change the meaning of a word. Square brackets show one possible pronunciation. Different speakers will sound different.
This is one possible pronunciation in casual American English. When we speak, the words run together. The spaces we write on the page are not always clear in the sound.