All 40 USA English phonemes (Was Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn")

Tue Feb 17 04:21:24 UTC 2009

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:29 AM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> My bad.  I've guess I must have reversed them.

Good that you're admitting this.

> What amazes me is that folks call these two n's different phonemes and yet they think schwa is one phoneme when it is in reality many.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that affects *meaning*
in a word.  So /n/ and /ng/ are separate phonemes because "sun" and
"sung" have different meanings.

The different realizations of the schwa don't affect meaning.  You can
say "believe" with the first syllable realized as /bee/ or /buh/ or
/bih/, without changing the meaning of the word.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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