Apr-Jul: I'll be in the South Pacific.
I’ve got phonemes on my mind
One of the things I like about this job is that I’m always learning.
I’ve been thinking about phonemes today, after talking with Jim and Anne Henderson on Saturday.
You can think of a phoneme as a meaningful unit of sound — not just a distinct sound, but a range of sounds that are “close enough” to mean the same thing in speech.
For example, s and sh are different phonemes in English, but they are not different to many Papua New Guinean ears. Sheep becomes sipsip in Tok Pisin; it’s doubled because sip means ship. And so you can see that even as s and sh lose their distinction, so do the short i and long e.
We notice a similar phenomenon when speakers of some Asian languages fail to distinguish between English l’s and r’s.
I started wondering just how many phonemes English has. How many meaningful sounds comprise our words?
The answer is not 26, if your first thought was the alphabet. In English, a phoneme can be represented by combinations of letters, and some letters represent more than one phoneme.
In fact, no one can agree on the number of phonemes in English, though the number lies between 34 and 46 (or maybe slightly more). This article compares phonemes to colors in a rainbow. You can identify colors, but the boundaries between them are impossible to define.
Today, many of the languages that are written down for the first time are written with phonemic alphabets — alphabets in which each letter represents one phoneme. English, as we know, is not so fortunate. In fact, we have hundreds of ways to spell a few dozen sounds.
But back to the Hendersons. The couple worked on an island called Rossel, whose language has a reputation as one of the most difficult in PNG. That’s saying a lot; remember, PNG has over 800 languages, and not many of them are known for their simplicity.
When I asked the couple why the language was so hard, phonemes were the first thing they brought up.
The Rossel language has 94 phonemes, some of which occur in no other language in the world.
94 phonemes. Staggering.
But some languages have even more. This African language has — are you ready? — 141 phonemes.
categories papua new guinea
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