No-one
has teach us, as children, how to discover the phonemes of our language. We do
it unconsciously and at an early age know what they are. Before reading this
book, or learning anything about phonology, you knew an l sound was part of the
English sound system, a phoneme in English, because it contrast words such as
leaf and reef. But you probably did not know that the l in leaf and the one in
feel are two different sounds. There is only one /l/ phoneme in English, but
more than one l phoneme. The /l/ that occurs before back vowels and at the end
of words is produced not only as a lateral but with the back of the tongue
raised toward the velum, and is therefore a velarised l. (Without more training
in phonetics you may not hear the difference; try to sense the difference in
your tongue position when you say leaf, lint, lay, let as opposed to lude,
load, lot, deal, dill, dell, doll.)
The
linguist from Mars, referred to in chapter 3, who is trying to write a grammar
of English, would have to decide whether the two l sounds observed in English
words represent seperate phonemes or are allophones of a single phoneme. How
can this be done ? How would any phonologist determine what the phonological
system of a language is ?
To
do a phonemic analysis, the words to be analysed must be transcribed in great
phonetic detail since you don’t know in advance which phonetic features are
distinctive and which are not.
Given
these words, do the voiceless/voiced alveolar stops [t] and [d] represent
different phonemes or are they allophones of the same phoneme ?
Now
consider the data from Greek, concentrating on the following sounds, three of
which do not occur in English :
