Allophone in the context of "Alternation (linguistics)"

In linguistics and related fields, an emic unit is a type of abstract object. Kinds of emic units are generally denoted by terms with the suffix -eme, such as phoneme, grapheme, and morpheme. The term "emic unit" is defined by Nöth (1995) to mean "an invariant form obtained from the reduction of a class of variant forms to a limited number of abstract units". The variant forms are called etic units (from phonetic). This means that a given emic unit is considered to be a single underlying object that may have a number of different observable "surface" representations.

The various etic units that represent a given emic unit of a certain kind are denoted by a corresponding term with the prefix allo- (other, different), such as allophone, allograph, and allomorph.

According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any alphabetic writing system (such as the English variety of the Latin alphabet, one of the more common types of writing systems in use today). In the education field, it is known as the alphabetic code.

Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in principle) almost perfectly phonemic orthography have a single letter (or digraph or, occasionally, trigraph) for each individual phoneme and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them, although predictable allophonic alternation is normally not shown. Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Serbo-Croatian (arguably, an example of perfect phonemic orthography), Macedonian, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Esperanto. The best cases have a straightforward spelling system, enabling a writer to predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation and similarly enabling a reader to predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic, Latin, Vedic, and Sanskrit (Devanāgarī—an abugida; see Vyakarana). On the other hand, French and English have a strong difference between sounds and symbols.

In linguistics (particularly phonetics and phonology), the phonetic environment of any given instance of a phone, a human speech sound, consists of the other phones adjacent to and surrounding it. A speech sound's phonetic environment, sometimes more broadly called its phonological environment, can determine its allophonic or phonemic qualities in a given language.

For example, the English vowel sound [æ], traditionally called the short A, in a word like mat (phonetically [mæt]), has the consonant [m] preceding it and the consonant [t] following it, while the [æ] vowel itself is word-internal and forms the syllable nucleus. This all describes the phonetic environment of [æ].

Osage (/oʊˈseɪdʒ, ˈoʊseɪdʒ/; Osage: 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 𐒻𐒷‎ Wažáže ie) is a Siouan language spoken by the people of the Osage Nation in northern Oklahoma. Their original territory was in the present-day Ohio River Valley, which they shared with other Siouan language nations. Slowly they migrated to present-day Missouri and Kansas areas (see Dhegihan migration), but they were gradually pushed west by pressure from invading colonial forces and settlement by other displaced Native American nations.

Osage has an inventory of sounds very similar to that of Dakota, also a Siouan language, plus vowel length, preaspirated obstruents and an interdental fricative (like "th" in English "then"). In contrast to Dakota, phonemically aspirated obstruents appear phonetically as affricates, and the high back vowel *u has been fronted to [y].

In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have been applied to it. In contrast, a surface representation is the phonetic representation of the word or sound. The concept of an underlying representation is central to generative grammar.

If more phonological rules apply to the same underlying form, they can apply wholly independently of each other or in a feeding or counterbleeding order. The underlying representation of a morpheme is considered to be invariable across related forms (except in cases of suppletion), despite alternations among various allophones on the surface.

In phonetics, aspiration is a strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most North American languages, South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.

In linguistics, pausa (Latin for 'break', from Greek παῦσις, pâusis 'stopping, ceasing') is the hiatus between prosodic declination units. The concept is somewhat broad, as it is primarily used to refer to allophones that occur in certain prosodic environments, and these environments vary between languages.