In human
language, a phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical
segments themselves, but
abstractions of them. An example of a phoneme would be the found in words like tip, stand, writer, and cat.In
sign languages, the basic movements were formerly called
cheremes (or cheiremes), but usage changed to phoneme.Some linguists (e.g.
Roman Jakobson) consider phonemes to be further decomposable into
features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features as opposed to phonemes however overlap each other in time. A phoneme could be seen as a contemporaneous bundle of features.
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