17
If we examine the words of a language closely, we discover that a single phoneme can
have a range of different pronunciations. For example, consider
the following English
words (note that [
and [
indicate a voiceless [l] and [n]):
/p/
pin [
]
spin [
/l/
leap [
]
sleep [
/n/
knees
]
sneeze [
]
/h/
who
]
huge [
]
In each pair of words, the sound is phonetically different because of the different
environment (e.g. /p/ is [p
h
] initially but [p] after /s/), but the sounds
are still perceived by
speakers of English as the same phoneme as there is no meaningful contrast between the
sounds, and substituting one for another would not produce a different word, just an
unusual pronunciation of the same word. Where two or more sounds
represent the same
underlying phoneme we call these
allophones. It is possible for two languages to have
the same sounds but to treat them differently in their phonological system. For example,
English and Spanish both have the sounds [
] and [
], however
in English these are two
different phonemes (
those [
] = /
/ and
doze [
] = /
/) while in
Spanish they are allophones of the same phoneme: [
] occurs at the beginning of words
and after consonants and [
] occurs between vowels (
Dios ‘God’ [
] = /
/ and
adiós ‘good-bye’ [
]= /
/).
18
Phonotactics
Just as languages have different phonemic inventories
and different allophones, they also
have different possibilities for combining sounds into syllables, or different
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