- Different picture of the three sounds [s], [z], [ʃ] in Korean and English:
Korean: The three sounds are allophones of one and the same phoneme.
English: They are in contrast and belong to three separate phonemes.
English Korean
Contrast: ship-zip-sip
/ʃ/ [ʃ]
/z/ [z] /s/
/s/ [s]
(i) Phonetic similarity: [s] and [z] share the place and manner of articulation,
different in voicing; [s] and [ʃ] share the voicing and the
manner of articulation different in place of articulation.
(ii) Allophonic processes: change to [ʃ] before /i/, and to [z] after nasals.
(Korean)
Assimilation refers to the influence that one sound may have on another
when
they are contiguous in time.
(i) regressive assimilation(anticipatory coarticulation):
The following(conditioning) sound influences the preceding(conditioned)
sound.
[s] [ʃ] / /i/ /sigan/ [ʃigan] ‘time’
(ii) progressive assimilation(perseverative coarticulation):
The preceding sound influences the following sound.
/s/ [z] / /n/ /insa/ [inza] ‘greetings’
- Assimilation Processes
Malayalam English
(separate phoneme) (allophone)
/n/ [n]
/n/
/ / [ ]
Contrast: panni “pig”
kaņņi ”first”
Spanish English
(allophone) (separate phoneme)
[d] /d/
/d/ Contrast: day - they
[ð] /ð/
Korean English
(allophone) (separate phoneme)
[r] /r/
/l/ Contrast: lake - rake
[l] /l/
To sum up
(a) The goal of any phonemic (phonological) analysis is to determine the
relationship between two or more sounds in a language.
(b) Two languages may share the same sounds, but arrange them differently.
That is, phonetic identity does not result in phonemic identity.
(c) Allophones of the same phoneme in a language must be phoneti-
cally
similar and be in complementary distribution.
(d) Realizations of different phonemes are in overlapping distribu-
tion, and
are in contrast. That is, they must be capable of changing the
meaning
of a word if substituted for each other.
(e) Rules often change only one or two features of a sound (or a group of
sounds), rather than making massive changes.
(f) The set of sounds a rule applies to and the sounds appearing in the
environment of a rule normally share a particular phonetic feature or
features. Sets of sounds that share the same value for a feature set or sets
of features are called “natural class.”