The difference between meaning and sound

The difference between meaning and sound

A key concept that applies to English and all other languages is that of phonemes. Understanding
what phonemes are is vital to using phonetic transcription correctly.
Every language has a set of phones. Phones are sounds that can be consistently and individually
distinguished in a spoken language, whether they mean anything or not. The number of phones in
a language can be very large, but only a few of those phones have any influence on the actual
meaning of speech. The phones that serve to distinguish between meanings are called phonemes,
and they are much fewer in number than the complete set of phones. English has about 42
phonemes. The important thing to remember is this: In order to understand a language and be
understood when speaking that language, a student must master all the phonemes of the language.
The other phones don’t matter (unless the student wants to rid herself of a “foreign” accent), but
the phonemes are vital and must receive priority in language instruction.
To state the definition of a phoneme another way, whenever any two sounds in a language are contrasted with each other to represent a difference in meaning, they are said to be phonemes. For
example, the difference between the vowel /i/ in pin and the vowel / / in pan mark a difference in
meaning between the two words, and so these vowel sounds are phonemes.
And so, by extension, any difference in pronunciation that serves to distinguish meaning is said to be phonemic. The more frequently two sounds are contrasted in a language to distinguish meaning, the more phonemic they are. If two sounds are simply characteristic of a language, but are never used to distinguish one meaning from another, they are phones, but they are not phonemes.

Vowel quality in English is phonemic; vowel length and nasality are not. In other words, the quality
of a vowel (as in pin compared to pan, for example) serves to distinguish meaning in English,
but the duration of a vowel does not. And it doesn’t matter in English whether a vowel is nasal or
oral—nasality or a lack thereof has no influence on meaning. So nasality isn’t phonemic, either.
This means that ordinarily you won’t transcribe vowel length or nasality in broad transcriptions.

An important consequence of the above is that you must teach the differences in vowel quality in
English, but you don’t have to teach differences in vowel length or nasality. Students must be able
to recognize and produce differences in vowel quality, or they won’t be able to communicate,
because these characteristics are phonemic.
However, they need not make distinctions in the length or nasality of vowels, because these have no influence on meaning. (The only exceptions are students who want to eliminate a foreign accent—they must master all the phones of English, not just the phonemic ones.)

The same principle applies to all phonemes of English. In transcription, you always transcribe
phonemes, because the transcription is incomprehensible without them. You may or may not
choose to transcribe other phones that are not phonemes, depending on the level of detail you want
in the transcription; but you cannot omit the phonemes. The broadest transcriptions contain only
phonemes (and are thus often called phonemic transcriptions); the narrowest transcriptions contain
the phonemes … plus everything else.

In every language, some phonemes are more important than others, because they occur more frequently in contrasting positions that serve to distinguish meaning. The most important phonemes
(or rather the most important contrasts between phonemes) should be taught first. In English, for
example, far more words are distinguished by the difference between /i/ and /i/ than are distinguished
by the difference between /θ/ and /ð/,* so the phonemes /i/ and /i/ should be taught first.

In some cases, a given phoneme may have several slightly different pronunciations, depending on
where it occurs. When several different phones are used in speech to represent the same phoneme,
they are called allophones of the phoneme. For example, [p] and [p ] are allophones of /p/ in
English; they are actually two slightly different sounds, but they represent the same phoneme.
Most English speakers will pronounce /p/ as [p ] at the start of a word like pop, but will pronounce
it as [p] in a word like spy. Similarly, Americans will often pronounce the /t/ of butter as [ɾ]; the
meaning is not changed, but [ɾ] (which sounds like the r in Spanish pero) becomes an allophone
of the phoneme /t/.

It’s not necessary to teach ESL students to pronounce different allophones of the same phoneme
unless they wish to eliminate a foreign accent. Since the allophones of a phoneme are interchangeable,

A student can pronounce any allophone of a given phoneme and still be understood
(although she may still have a noticeable accent). However, it’s often useful to teach ESL students
to recognize different allophones of the same phoneme, so that they will not mistake the different
allophones for independent phonemes.
Students approaching a language for the first time have no idea which phones in the language are phonemic and which are not, nor do they know which phones are allophones of the same phoneme. It’s up to their language instructor to teach them thedistinctions.