| allophone |
| Definition: A member of a set of different phones that a language's speakers treat as the same phoneme. |
| Example: In English the [p] in spin and the [pH] in pin are allophones of the phoneme /p/. Note: English speakers usually assume that they are the same sound, but they aren't: the first is unaspirated and the second is aspirated. |
| Etymology: The word was coined by combining the Greek allo, other or different + phone, sound or voice, |
| OED: The word's first OED citation is from 1938: "Allophones or positional variants." (B. L. Whorf Language, Thought, & Reality (1956), 126) |
| Feedback:
Useful addition perhaps: phones are entities that bear no relation to meaning (i.e. they can be heard, distinguished, and even transcribed, although they might not be a sound in your language). Allophones, however, are phones that are "tied" to a phoneme in a given language.
(Jack Ognistoff) |