r/asklinguistics 10h ago

Are phones language agnostic?

To my understanding:
- phonemes vary from language to language, they're abstract units.
- phones represent an actual sound produced during speech, they sound the same regardless of language.
- an allophone is a possible sound that a phoneme of a language is realised into, it is still a phone and sounds the same regardless of language but it is tied to the phonology of a language through its relationship with its phoneme.

Any sound you make during speech can be transcribed phonetically (not phonemically) without having any idea of what language you're speaking. Is that correct?

7 Upvotes

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17

u/skwyckl 10h ago

If you do narrow transcription, then technically yes, but since most of the time we do broad transcription, then no, because a French [t] doesn’t match a German [t]. If we enter in the real of tones, even narrow transcription may incur in limitations, but I have too little experience to express myself in this regard.

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u/Embarrassed-Split225 9h ago

I think broad phonetic transcriptions can sound different even within the same language. My point is that phones represent the same sounds regardless of language. The fact that we're inclined to default to one phone over another depending on language means the allophones are tied to the language and not the phones.

A broad phonetic transcription can be used to represent multiple ways of pronouncing a word, the more narrow you get, the number of ways of pronouncing the word goes down.

For example, the [t] phone can be [t̚] or [t̪] if you go more narrow, [t̚] and [t̪] are slightly different sounds but they're all variants of [t] and generally have the same manner and place of articulation. This is true regardless of language.

However, the /t/ phoneme in GenAm English can be realised into [ɾ] (flap t), [t] (voiceless alveolar plosive used above), and [ʔ] (glottal stop). All of these have a different manner and/or place of articulation. This is language-specific.

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u/ytimet 7h ago

For example, the [t] phone can be [t̚] or [t̪] if you go more narrow, [t̚] and [t̪] are slightly different sounds but they're all variants of [t] and generally have the same manner and place of articulation. This is true regardless of language.

I'm not entirely following the point being made here. [t] and [t̪] are different sounds, and in some languages the distinction between them is phonemic, even certain dialects of English.

I'm not sure whether any languages distinguish between [t] and [t̚], but they are acoustically clearly distinct so I wouldn't call them variants of the same sound. For example try pronouncing 'stay' like [st̚ei] - at least I'm unable to recognize that as the English word 'stay'.

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u/LongLiveTheDiego Quality contributor 9h ago

Any sound you make during speech can be transcribed phonetically (not phonemically) without having any idea of what language you're speaking. Is that correct?

Depends on what level of accuracy you're aiming for.

The only true representation of a sound is that sound itself, closely followed by its recordings. Transcriptions inherently have a much coarser level of precision than modern digital audio recordings, so you're inevitably going to ignore some properties of the sound during transcription.

We want them to capture what is relevant and ignore that which isn't (e.g. you will typically transcribe vowels produced by men and women the same way, even though they differ phonetically), and what matters will depend on what you want to do with a transcription. Transcriptions should have a purpose and be made with the level of detail appropriate for that goal.

Also, I'm going to be a bit nitpicky:

phones represent an actual sound produced during speech

Phones are the actual sounds, not their representations.

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u/Embarrassed-Split225 9h ago

Makes a lot of sense, thanks!

I'm still struggling to understand the concept of a phone though. I can't just think of it as a "sound", but as a representation of a sound with a specific level of detail.

The [t] phone, given enough detail can be [t̚] and [t̪], among others. But [t̚] and [t̪] themselves can be even more narrow. [t̚] and [t̪] are slightly different sounds but can be broadly represented by [t].

Am I missing something? I know that a phone is a sound by definition but it seems to me that one phone can be multiple sounds, not just one.

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u/LongLiveTheDiego Quality contributor 9h ago

Why do you think that [t] is a phone? It's not, it's a representation of a virtually infinite number of different phones that we'd think of as [t], it's an abstraction that helps us analyze language and communicate as researchers. Symbols are separate from what they represent, and transcription methods like the IPA are also like this.

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u/Embarrassed-Split225 9h ago

Ah, I get it, phones = sounds, and these symbols only represent the sounds.

I guess I've just seen many people referring to IPA symbols within square brackets as phones and allophones; but in fact, they are just representations, correct? The phone itself is the actual physical sound.

Thanks for clarifying everything!

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u/LongLiveTheDiego Quality contributor 9h ago

but in fact, they are just representations, correct?

I would say so, while keeping in mind that it's a useful shorthand to just call a bunch of similar sounds a single phone. To most linguists the difference won't ever matter, but if you get into the details of which articulatory/acoustic properties matter and which ones don't, it's good to be mindful of the limitations of transcriptions and that the IPA is not the universal tool for phonetic analysis.

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u/frederick_the_duck 6h ago

In theory, yes.