Antedating of "Phoneme"

[Shapiro, Fred]

phoneme (OED 1894)

1879 _The Academy_ 27 Sept. 234 (ProQuest)  The author [Ferdinand de Saussure] concludes that the duality of _a_ and _o_ in the classical languages is original, and that two vowels or phonemes, as he calls them, must have been confounded in the single _a_ of the Northern group.

Fred Shapiro

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