In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level — that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words.

German uses the tesseragraphs ( four letters ) " tsch " for the phoneme and " dsch " for, although the latter is rare.

An example is modern Greek which may write the phoneme in six different ways: ⟨ ι ⟩, ⟨ η ⟩, ⟨ υ ⟩, ⟨ ει ⟩, ⟨ οι ⟩, and ⟨ υι ⟩ ( although the last is rare ).

In phonology, an allophone (; from the, állos, " other " and φωνή, phōnē, " voice, sound ") is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds ( or phones ) used to pronounce a single phoneme.

Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable.

Every time a speech sound is produced for a given phoneme, it will be slightly different from other utterances, even for the same speaker.

When a specific allophone ( from a set of allophones that correspond to a phoneme ) must be selected in a given context ( i. e. using a different allophone for a phoneme will cause confusion or make the speaker sound non-native ), the allophones are said to be complementary ( i. e. the allophones complement each other, and one is not used in a situation where the usage of another is standard ).

Again, this difference is much more obvious to a Turkish speaker, for whom and are separate phonemes, than to an English speaker, for whom they are allophones of a single phoneme.

However, when there are complementary allophones of a phoneme, so that the allophony is significant, things become more complicated.

Often, if only one of the allophones is simple to transcribe, in the sense of not requiring diacritics, then that representation is chosen for the phoneme.

In such cases a common convention is to use the " elsewhere condition " to decide which allophone will stand for the phoneme.

In other cases, an allophone may be chosen to represent its phoneme because it is more common in the world's languages than the other allophones, because it reflects the historical origin of the phoneme, or because it gives a more balanced look to a chart of the phonemic inventory.

A commonly considered abstraction is the phoneme, which abstracts speech sounds in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning.

In his story " Gulf ", science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used a constructed language, in which every Basic English word is replaced with a single phoneme, as an appropriate means of communication for a race of genius supermen.

Czech features a phoneme that is said to be unique to the language, the consonant ř.

West African English tends to be syllable-timed, and its phoneme inventory is much simpler than that of Received Pronunciation ; this sometimes affects mutual intelligibility with native varieties of English.

Since the Cirth is an alphabet, one rune generally stands for one sound ( phoneme ) and sounds that would be written with a digraph in English ( such as " sh " and " th ") are written with one rune.

Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at a more abstract level, as a component of morphemes ; these units can be called morphophonemes, and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology.

However, progress in Chinese linguistics was seriously hampered by the lack of any concept of a phoneme — i. e. a basic unit of sound, including vowels and vowel-like segments as well as consonants.

The glosseme is defined as the smallest irreductible unit of both the content and expression planes of language ; in the expression plane, the glosseme is said to be identical or nearly identical to the phoneme, whereas it is stressed that traditional analyses have not adequately revealed the basic units of the content plane of languages.

The phoneme is defined by the International Phonetic Association as " the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances ".

In this book he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language.

* The initial consonant phoneme exhibited by the character 話 ( word, speech ; Mandarin hua ) is pronounced f or v in Hakka ( v does not properly exist as a distinct unit in many Chinese languages ).

He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology.

Functions exist on all levels of grammar, and even in phonology, where the function of the phoneme is to distinguish between lexical material.

In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings.

The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay ( together with his former student Mikołaj Kruszewski ) introduced the concept of the phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology.

Linguistics makes a distinction between a phone and phoneme, and between phonology and phonetics.

In generative phonology, another form of transformation is the phonological rule, which describes a mapping between an underlying representation ( the phoneme ) and the surface form that is articulated during natural speech.

Tagmemics makes the kind of distinction made between phone and phoneme in phonology and phonetics at higher levels of linguistic analysis ( grammatical and semantic ); for instance, contextually conditioned synonyms are considered different instances of a single tagmeme, as sounds which are ( in a given language ) contextually conditioned are allophones of a single phoneme.

Relevant differences in the phonology of the Island and Upriver dialects are noted at the foot of the phoneme charts.

Complementary distribution is commonly applied to phonology, where similar phones in complementary distribution are usually allophones of the same phoneme.

In German, words starting with sch-( constituting the German phoneme ) would be intercalated between words with initial sca-and sci-( all incidentally loanwords ) instead of this graphic cluster appearing after the letter s, as though it were a single letter — a lexicographical policy which would be de rigueur in a dictionary of Albanian, i. e. dh -, ë -, gj -, ll -, rr -, th -, xh-and zh-( all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters ) would follow the letters d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x and z respectively.

There are two types of allophones, based on whether a phoneme must be pronounced using a specific allophone in a specific situation, or whether the speaker has freedom to ( unconsciously ) choose which allophone he or she will use.

However, is not a phoneme in Mandarin, which has no voiced plosives, therefore the initial voicing of is not significant to the Chinese listener.

His research on Southern Paiute, in collaboration with consultant Tony Tillohash, led to a 1933 article which would become influential in the characterization of the phoneme.

Another similar system used to write the Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary ( also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences.

English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant, which in many accents has two allophones.

The orthography uses the letter ł to represent this phoneme ( not that it doesn't specifically represent the sound, it represents the phoneme which in some dialects is and in some ).

In some languages, such as Japanese, there is one liquid phoneme which may have both lateral and rhotic allophones.

The surface form produced by the morphophonological rules may consist of phonemes ( which are then subject to ordinary phonological rules to produce speech sounds or phones ), or else the morphophonological analysis may bypass the phoneme stage and produce the phones itself.

However a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set ( or equivalence class ) of speech sounds ( phones ) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language.

Different speech sounds representing the same phoneme are known as allophones, such variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may be free in which case it may vary randomly.

An example is the English phoneme, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, school, skill.

While phonemes are normally conceived of as abstractions of discrete segmental speech sounds ( vowels and consonants ), there are other features of pronunciation – principally tone and stress – which in some languages can change the meaning of words in the way that phoneme contrasts do, and are consequently called phonemic features of those languages.

When a phoneme has more than one allophone, the one actually heard at a given occurrence of that phoneme may be dependent on the phonetic environment ( surrounding sounds ) – allophones which normally cannot appear in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution.