User:WarmNoodle/Phone (phonetics)

Phone (phonetics)
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In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words.

In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. Phones are absolute and are not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages.

For example, the English words kid and kit end with two distinct phonemes, /d/ and /t/, and swapping one for the other would change one word into a different word. However, the difference between the /p/ sounds in pun ([pʰ], with aspiration) and spun ([p], without aspiration) never affects the meaning or identity of a word in English. Therefore, [p] cannot be replaced with [pʰ] (or vice versa) and thereby convert one word to another. That causes [pʰ] and [p] to be two distinct phones but not distinct phonemes in English.

By contrast, swapping the same two sounds in Hindustani can change one word into another: [pʰal] (फल/پھل) means 'fruit', and [pal] (पल/پل) means 'moment'. The sounds [pʰ] and [p] are thus different phonemes in Hindustani but are not distinct phonemes in English.

As seen in the examples, phonemes, rather than phones, are the features of speech that are mapped onto the characters of an orthography.

Connections to orthography
Whether a direct mapping between phonemes and characters is achieved depends on the type of orthography used, phonological orthographies like the Indonesian orthography tend to have one-to-one mappings of phonemes to characters whereas alphabetic orthographies like the English orthography tend to try to have direct mappings but end up mapping one phoneme to multiple characters often.

In the examples above the characters enclosed in square brackets: "pʰ" and "p" are IPA representations of phonemes. The IPA unlike English and Indonesian is not a a practical orthography and is used by linguists to obtain phonetic transcriptions of words in spoken languages and is therefore a strongly phonetically spelled system by design.