--- Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
> But if you cannot get a unitary definition of the
> phoneme, what's the point
> of even trying to define it?
How many words in the dictionary only have one
definition?
One could describe phoneme as broadly catching the
meaning of the set of sounds (or articulations)
fundamental to a language and from that define it as
(1) the set of sounds an untrained speaker can
individually recognise in their native language (by
which /2/ and /9/ in French would definitely be
phonemic) or
(2) the minimal set of sounds needed to describe each
word in a particular language.
--
Tristan.
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