ポッドキャストで言語学入門：「音素ってなんですか？」
ELLOのポッドキャスト「Bergsせんせい，しつもーん」から，音素の回を書き起こしてみました．（ポッドキャストの一覧はこちら）
#02: 音素ってなんですか？
■Question: What is a phoneme?
■Mr. Bergs: A phoneme is the smallest meaning-distinguishing unit, meaning-differentiating unit in language. So these are the sounds that you see, or hear rather, when you listen to words like "house" and "mouse" for example. The beginning of the word, here the two words are distinguished by [h] sound and [m] sound. Similarly when you look at "cat" and "mat", or when you look at "bit" and "but", here the two vowel sounds distinguish the meanings of the two words; or you could even look at the end of a word. You have "bus" and "but": they are distinguished by the [t] and the [s] sounds. And certain sounds do that in a language. They form the so-called "phoneme inventory". The phoneme inventory is the number of sounds that distinguish meaning in a given language. This is not infinite, this is quite limited. Some languages only comprises about ten or twelve or fifteen sounds. In English it's something like thirty-five or thirty-six. Different sounds that help you to form new words by distinguishing between the words. You can distinguish between vowel phonemes, consonant phonemes, [and] sometimes even diphthongs; so two sounds combined into one can be a phoneme, as in "mouse" and "mice" for example. "Mouse" and "mice" are only distinguished by the [aʊ] and the [aɪ] sounds, so these are two diphthongs that help you distinguish between one single animal and many different animals.
- phoneme: 音素
- phoneme inventory: 音素目録
- diphthong: 二重母音
