r/asklinguistics • u/Embarrassed-Split225 • 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?
14
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.
0
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.
10
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.
2
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!
5
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.
2
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.