The phoneme /’fәʊni:m/, phone and allophone

Specifically, the term phone is used when a speech sound is considered separate from
language. Allophones are phonetic variations of a phenome that do not change spoken
word meaning, while phonemes are those speech sounds that serve to contrast
meaning between words.

The Difference Between Them?

So the difference between these terms then is a phoneme is the mental representation
of the sound of the word. While the phone is a sound representation of the phoneme or
the word’s sound, it is called a phonetic depiction.

The final term, the allophone, is the different ways in which the phoneme can be
represented or the different ways a word is pronounced.

Phoneme
Phonemes are usually written in slashes to distinguish them from phones. It is the
mental representation of a specific word. This means it is the mental image we store in
our brains of the specific word and is associated with the sound of the word.

A phoneme is defined as: “the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in
any given language, like in the example, puff, /pʌf/. So in the transcription system used
by the International Transcription Association, this is a broad transcription of the word
puff.

A phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language that distinguishes a word from
another, such as the /p/ in the word ´tap´ which differentiate this word from the words
´tab´ ´tag´ ´tan´. Phonemes are based on spoken language and they are mostly
recorded with special symbols such as the ones taken from the International Phonetic
Alphabet.
Phonemes are language-specific, this means that the phonemes that are used in
English may not be used or may not work in other languages. Different languages have
different phonemes.
When transcribing a phoneme, symbols are generally placed between slashes (/p/ /b/
/g/ /n/)
Allophone
In English the t sounds in the words “hit,” “tip,” and “little” are allophones; phonemically
they are considered to be the same sound although they are different phonetically in
terms of aspiration, voicing, and point of articulation.

An allophone is the different ways you can say a word or basically another way to
pronounce a phoneme. This can be seen in the various ways different speakers of the
English language pronounce ‘water.’

An American English speaker will pronounce water with a “d” instead of like other
English speakers with a “t” in the center of the word. These different ways in which a
word can be pronounced are then called an Allophone.

Phone
This is the actual sound of a word that you can hear and is represented in phonology
with square brackets surrounding it. In this part of the phonetics study, it is the part that
studies how humans make the sound of a specific word.

An example can be the word puff, so when you speak the word aloud, that sound is
called the phone. So you are speaking out the word’s mental presentation, the
phoneme, which is a symbol representing the sound and makes an actual sound.

This is represented in the symbol that is written in the square brackets, and it is written
as it sounds, like this: [pʌf]

Minimal Pairs
Two words that vary by only a single sound that is in the same position in each word.

In the first dialogue we have (...) Their flight here was eight hours.(...)´ In this case, the
word is flight and the minimal pair can be ´Fight´
Flight - /flaɪt/ Fight - /faɪt/ We can see that the phoneme that varies is the /l/ that
appears in the word flight but not in the word fight.

In the line ´ Yeah. We have no secrets. Not even our bodies. (...)´
We have the example ´Not´ and its minimal pair can be ´Lot´ varying on the first sound
or phoneme. Not /nɒt/ - Lot /lɒt/

In the line ´ (...), I believe it means "proudly uneducated´ We have the word ´means´
and its minimal pair is beans. The phoneme that differs is the one at the beginning of
the word. Mean - /miːn/ - Bean - /biːn/
Rhoticity
Rhoticity: fundamental phonological division of English varieties depending upon a
difference in the phonotactic distribution of the consonant “r”.

In accents with a high degree of Rhoticity, the “r” is often overtly realized in a wide
variety of phonetic contexts including post vocalic environments such as US:/ɑr/ or
US:/ˈgɑrbɪdʒ/

In the accents that exhibit a low degree of Rhoticity, “r” is not used in most post vocalic
environments thus we get UK: /ˈɑːr/ or UK:*/ˈgɑːrbɪdʒ/

Homographs and the like

Two or more words that are spelled the same but have different meanings

IPA Transcriptions
In the world of Phonetics and phonology there are 2 types of symbols: phonetic and
phonemic
Phonetic uses phonetic symbols between squared brackets[ ]
Phonemic uses phonemic symbols between / /

Phonemic symbols are used for Phonemic transcriptions. Every speech sound made by
speakers must be identified as a phoneme and represented with the appropriate
symbol.
There are 2 types of Phonemic transcription: from dictation and from a written text
dictation: person must listen to a person speaking or a recording and write down what
they hear using the symbols
written text: person must read the text written in orthography and represent it with the
symbols