23. What are phonemes and why's it so hard to lose a foreign accent?
Description
This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
23. What are phonemes and why's it so hard to lose a foreign accent?
[--markrose]
The sounds (*phones*) humans can make are infinite; there's (almost always)
a continuum of phones in between any two phones.
In any one language, however, phones are grouped into 20 to 60 or so discrete
groups of sounds called *phonemes*. The range of variation for each phoneme
is discounted by speakers and hearers of the language, who perceive the
entire range as "the same sound."
The English phoneme /p/ has two phonetic realizations or *allophones*:
aspirated [ph] beginning a word and non-aspirated [p] elsewhere. But
since the two types of /p/ never distinguish one word from another, speakers
of English generally don't even notice the difference. (Linguists
write phonemic transcriptions between /slashes/, and phonetic transcriptions
in [brackets].)
If we can find two words with different meaning but only one difference in
sound between them-- a *minimal pair*-- then we've found distinct phonemes;
e.g. /p/ and /b/ in English 'pit' and 'bit'. If two sounds never occur in
the same phonetic environment (e.g. English [p] and [ph])-- if they're in
*complementary distribution*-- then they're probably allophones of a single
phoneme. (I say 'probably' because English [h] and [ng] are also in
complementary distribution, but linguists balk at assigning them to one
phoneme.)
Other languages do not divide up the phonetic space in the same way. For
instance, /p/ and /ph/ are separate phonemes in Mandarin Chinese (as in
/pa1/ 'eight' and /pha1/ 'flower'). And the vowels of 'late' and 'let',
phonemes in English, are allophones of a single phoneme /e/ in Spanish.
We're trained from childhood to make the phonetic distinctions our language
uses to keep its phonemes apart, and to ignore those it doesn't.
Learning to make different distinctions in a foreign language is quite
difficult-- usually harder than making new sounds our native language lacks
entirely. We'll continue to have an accent in the new language so long as
we hear its sounds through our native language's phonemic filter.
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