phonemes

• plural

  plural

  The grammatical form denoting more than one person, place, thing, or idea.

  of phoneme.
  phoneme

  noun

  any of a small set of units, usually about 20 to 60 in number, and different for each language, considered to be the basic distinctive units of speech sound by which morphemes, words, and sentences are represented. They are arrived at for any given language by determining which differences in sound function to indicate a difference in meaning, so that in English the difference in sound and meaning between pit and bit is taken to indicate the existence of different labial phonemes, while the difference in sound between the unaspirated p of spun and the aspirated p of pun, since it is never the only distinguishing feature between two different words, is not taken as ground for setting up two different p phonemes in English.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

phonemes

"We can capture the tone, the character, the style, the phonemes, and even if you have an accent, we can capture that as well," he told the Future Visionaries podcast in 2021.

From BBC ● Aug. 31, 2024

According to Rendell, the evidence shows whales are mainly repeating the same phoneme over and over again instead of actually combining varieties of phonemes into complex words.

From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2024

Other neurons reflected more complex aspects of word construction such as the specific assembly of phonemes into syllables.

From Science Daily ● Feb. 1, 2024

People with aphasia may exhibit linguistic errors such as the inversion, substitution, addition or subtraction of phonemes when communicating.

From Scientific American ● Oct. 12, 2023

For example, English transcribes about 40 phonemes with a mere 26 letters.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

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