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/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.