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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words ''kill'' and ''kiss'' is a result of the exchange of the phoneme for the phoneme . Two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, phonemes (established by the use of minimal pairs, such as ''kill'' vs ''kiss'' or ''pat'' vs ''bat'') are written between slashes like this: , whereas when it is desired to show the more exact pronunciation of any sound, linguists use square brackets, for example (indicating an aspirated p). Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in ''phonemic'' (or ''phonematic'') terms. However, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (''phones'') which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the "k" sounds in the words ''kit'' and ''skill'' are not identical (as described below), but they are distributional variants of a single phoneme . Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones. Allophonic variation may be conditioned, in which case a certain phoneme is realized as a certain allophone in particular phonological environments, or it may be free in which case it may vary randomly. In this way, phonemes are often considered to constitute an abstract underlying representation for segments of words, while speech sounds make up the corresponding phonetic realization, or surface form. ==Notation== Phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds (phones) are placed between square brackets. Thus represents a sequence of three phonemes , , (the word ''push'' in standard English), while represents the phonetic sequence of sounds (aspirated "p"), , (the usual pronunciation of ''push''). (Another similar convention is the use of angle brackets to enclose the units of orthography, namely graphemes; for example, The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the same set of symbols that are most commonly used for phones. (For computer typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum exist to represent IPA symbols in plain text.) However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle, ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach is often hampered by the complexity of the relationship between orthography and pronunciation (see Correspondence between letters and phonemes below). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Phoneme」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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