The Sounds of Language, Part 3

Now that we've considered the vowels and consonants, what else could possibly be phonemic? What else can make a difference in meaning?

Just tell me why I would want to subject you to that subject?
Children whose conduct is exemplary conduct themselves well at all times.
Do you buy your produce in stores that produce many happy customers?
If you contract a mental disease, are you allowed to enter into a contract?
I'd like to present you with a present.
You can compare and contrast items only if there is a meaningful contrast between them.
The gentlemen on a protest demonstration protest their innocence too loudly.
An invalid may vote, and his/her vote will not be invalid.
The striking garbage collectors refuse to pick up the refuse.

I hope you get the point. Changing the stress from one syllable to another has the power to change the meaning of the word. Thus, we see that in English, stress is definitely phonemic. On the other hand, Hungarian is a language in which the stress always falls on the first syllable, no matter how long the word. So in that language, stress is not phonemic at all. It cannot change the meaning of a word.

Many people study Spanish and are familiar with its accent marks. Those little marks occurring above vowels tell us that one syllable is stressed more strongly than the others in the same word. If you shift the stress from one syllable to another, you might wind up with a nonsense word; or you might you might change the word's meaning in some way. For example, "hablo" is stressed on the first syllable, and means "I speak." "habló", on the other hand, stresses the last syllable and means "he/she/you spoke." "hable" is a command, meaning "speak!" "hablé" is a past tense, meaning "I spoke." "ingles" (stress on the first syllable) means "intestines, guts," "inglés" (stress on the last syllable) means "English." Changing the stress has the power to change the tense and the subject of the verb simultaneously, or, in the latter example, the complete meaning of the word. Thus, we have demonstrated that stress is phonemic in Spanish.

Stress is called a suprasegmental feature in a language. If stress can be proven to be phonemic, we then need to label suprasegmental phonemes separately from segmental ones (i.e., the consonants and vowels).

Can anything else be phonemic?

As a matter of fact, yes. The TONE of a word. To some extent, tone in English can be phonemic, but not in the same way that it is phonemic in Chinese. In English, if the TONAL CONTOUR shifts, it can create a difference in how the sentence is to be interpreted. We'll look at tonal contours in another posting. For the sake of this one, we'll assume that tone in and of itself is not really phonemic in English. However, tone is very much a phonemic reality to be reckoned with in all the Chinese languages and in others such as Zulu and many Native American languages.

A Mandarin word can be pronounced with one of four different tones. Each tone alters the word's meaning so that the same segmental phonemes pronounced in the different tones can mean mother, hemp, horse and also be used to indicate that what was just said is a question. That word is /ma/. With the suprasegmental toneme marker placed above the vowel, it could be /mā/ (first, or high tone), /má/ (second, or rising tone), /mă/ (third or falling-rising tone), /mà/ (fourth, or falling tone). Ma (with no tone markings) is termed a neutral tone. You can see that mother, hemp, horse and a grammatical indicator of interrogation have absolutely nothing to do with one another. One more fascinating example in Mandarin is that /măi/ means "buy" and /mài/ means "sell." You can really get into trouble if you confuse those two! That's the power of tone in Mandarin!

Cantonese is even more complex with its nine tonemes.

Zulu's two tones seem to be relegated to the personal pronouns. If a verb is pronounced with one tone, then the subject is "you;" if with the contrasting tone, then the subject is he/she. So tone is much more limited in its use in that language.

Consonants, vowels, stress and tone - these are the relevant distinctive features that make up the phonology of the languages of the world. In a future posting, we will begin to see how phonemes, though devoid of meaning on their own, combine to form particles - pieces of words which linguists call MORPHEMES, and that these little pieces, though they don't exist in isolation, are of vital importance in making up the longer units, the units we call "words."

Feel free to comment, query or add to any point made in this and other postings on this blog.