Phoneme

Translations

fonema | phonème | Phonem

Article

Minimal endolinguistic structural unit of sound. The concept was developed within the European structuralist schools in the central decades of the 20th century, but a useful systematization is provided by Koerner (1978).

A phoneme should not be confused with a phone, which is simply an articulated sound, as the phoneme carries distinctive value within a language and is, therefore, a structural unit of the system it belongs to.

While the exact phonetic nature of sounds is very difficult to reconstruct for ancient corpus languages, phonology as a system can generally be reconstructed, and its diachronic alterations are extremely important when one deals with the hypothesis of contact-induced phonological interference, by which the phonemic inventory of a target language is modified by the influence of the phonemic inventory of the model language.

Example

For examples of interference on the phonological level, see phonological interference.

References

Koerner, E.F.K. 1978. Zu Ursprung und Entwicklung des Phonembegriffs. D. Hartmann et al., ed., Sprache in Gegenwart und Geschichte, Cologne, pp. 82-93.