phoneme

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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The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems Java ME reference source code, licensed under the GNU General Public License.
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n. phoneme, syllable; sound, utterance; smallest units of speech upon which a language is based

n. (Linguistics) phoneme, smallest units of speech upon which a language is based

Noun
1. (linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
(hypernym) phone, speech sound, sound
(hyponym) allophone
(classification) linguistics