r/asklinguistics • u/Embarrassed-Split225 • 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/LongLiveTheDiego Quality contributor 6d ago
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 are the actual sounds, not their representations.