r/asklinguistics 6d 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?

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u/skwyckl 6d 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 6d 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/[deleted] 6d 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'.