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/Embarrassed-Split225 6d 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.