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History Of The Phoneme Theory Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
The first linguist to point 9ut the distinction between the “phone” (speech-sound), Russian “zvuk”, and the “phoneme” (Russian “fonema”) was Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), the famous Russian philologist of Polish origin, who established himself in Russia, first as a privat-docent at St. Petersburg then as Professor- for eight years (1875- 1883) in Kazan, where he created his famous school of linguistics. Later he held professorships at Dorpat (1883-1893), Cracow (1893-1900) and eventually St. Petersburg (1901-1918) where he continued to develop his teaching. He spent the last years of his life inPoland.
He worked out the fundamental principle of the phoneme during the 1870’s, from 1868 to be more exact, thus forestalling Western European linguistics by nearly 40 years. Baudouin de Courtenay stated more than once that the word “phoneme” was invented by his student Kruszewsky. Baudouin de Courtenay did not, however, write on this theme, and in fact, no clear exposition of it appeared in print until 1894, when he published is Proba Teorj Alternacyj Fonelycznych. A German translation of this, Versuch einer Theorie phonetischer Alternationen, was published at Strassburg in 1895.
He proceeded from the assumption that the role of sounds in the mechanism of language, for communication between people, does not coincide with their physical nature, and that this non-coincidence makes the distinction between “phonemes” and “speech-sounds” necessary. In his theory he subordinated the phonetic side of speech to the social function of language as a means of communication. He stated not only the mutual relationships of phonemes, but also the ways in which they are formed historically.
D. Jones
The well-known English phonetician D. Jones points out in his book The Phoneme: its Nature, Development and Origin that the term phoneme as used by Baudouinde Courtenay was a phonetic one. This phonetic concept can be viewed in two ways in his works—“psychologically” and “physically”. Viewed “psychologically”, a phoneme is a speech-sound pictured in one’s mind and aimed at in the process of talking. The actual concrete sound (phone) employed in any particular speech-utterance may be the pictured sound or it may be another sound having some affinity to it, its use being conditioned by some feature or features of the phonetic context. Baudouin de Courtenay recognized two kinds of phonetics: one was called psychophonetics and related to the pictured sounds; the other was calledphysiophonetics and related to concrete sounds actually uttered.
Viewed from the “physical” point of view, a phoneme is a set of sounds uttered in a particular language which count for practical purposes as if they were one and the same; the use of each member of the set is conditioned by
the phonetic environment, i.e. no one member ever occurs in a situation reserved for another (for example, in English the /k/ sound of call neveroccurs before an /i/; nor does the /k/ sound of king ever occur before /0:/ Baudouin’s theory of the phonological distribution of phonemes is very important, especially in its relationship to the construction of phonetic transcriptions, the devising of alphabets for languages and to the practical teaching of spoken foreign languages.
L.V. Scerba
Baudouin de Courtenay idea was developed by his immediate follower L .Scerba in 1912, in his book Russian Vowels in their Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects.
The definition of the phoneme given by Scerba as the smallest general phonetic representation of the given language which is able to associate with the meaning representation and to differentiate words was of a semantic character. In this definition L.Scerba emphasized the close connection between phoneme and meaning.
Phoneme
The phoneme is the smallest unit of language because it cannot be divided any smaller; but nevertheless, it is a complex phenomenon. It consists of a number of features which are not independent, but occur simultaneously in the phoneme; for example, the Russian /g/ may be considered as voiced or voiceless, soft or hard, nasal or non-nasal and so on. These distinctive features usually occur together in a bundle of sound- features of several at a time. Some of these features are distinctive, while others are not. The use of any particular feature is conditioned by the phonetic environment or by the position of the phoneme. In Russian , for example, the \k\ of ruka ‘hand’ may occur before \a\,\o\, \u\, and at the end of a word but never before \i\, or \e\, giving us the \k’\ phoneme; this \k’\ never occurs at the end of a word.
The same feature of a phoneme in different languages may have a different functional character: in Russian the voiced\voiceless feature is neutralized at the end of a word \prut-twig; prud- pond/, whereas in English this feature distinguishes the meanings of such words as bat and bad, hat and had.
7. Typological characteristics of consonants in Eng. & Rus. The most common mistakes in articulating.
Consonants are pronounced when there’s some stoppage on the way of the stream of air, passing through organs pf speech.
Consonants are divided according to their: - manner of articulation, - place of articulation.
They may be explosive if there’s some block which is on the way of the air (p,t,k).
In both lang-s there are: - fricatives like (s, sh); - sonorants if the stream of the air passes through nasal cavity (m,n, in both lang-s); - glottal cons-ts (g); - rolled sounds (р – in Rus.); - lateral (боковой звук) - when the stream of air passes through on both sides of the tongue.
They may be soft or hard (Л – Л’ Rus)
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