@curiousdannii Oh! So there is a distinction, just that it's subtle.

@Susan Wikipedia seems to say that ס was originally /s/ and ש was /ʃ/, /θ/ and /ɬ/, but over time the /ɬ/ turned into /s/.

@Dɑvïd English orthography is just too messy

@ktm5124 A phoneme is an abstract basic sound, which is then realised as multiple 'allophones' in speech. For example, in many languages voicing is not phonemic, so that [b] and [p] are two variations of the one sound. In English voicing is phonemic, but aspiration isn't, so [p] and [pʰ] are allophones, but in other languages they are separate phonemes, and to speakers of those languages will sound completely different.

Another example is that in many languages [l] and [ɹ] are allophones. That's where the 'jokes' of Asian people saying "flied lice" come from. It was also the case in a language I worked with in PNG, and I could never tell if one of their villages was meant to be pronounced "Boilave" or "Boirave". I guess for them they're the same!

@ktm5124 Oh, I should've read this before launching into an explanation :P

How interesting! I just learned about allophones.

If you see a sound written like this /b/ it is a phoneme, but if like this [b] an allophone.

The two terms are easy to remember since they come from Greek, i.e. Φωνή meaning "sound" and άλλος meaning "other" or "another".

@curiousdannii I have seen that notation before, but I never knew what it meant. Thanks!

There are also allomorphs. So in- im- il- and ir- are all the same prefix: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in-#Etymology_3

Cool.

I see that in Latin, too. in- and se- can both mean the same thing. E.g. securus = without care, indignitas = without dignity

Would these be allomorphs in Latin? Or is semantic equivalence not enough?

Ooh. I just answered my own question. Clearly, in- and se- are not allomorphs, even though they can be semantically equivalent. Though in- and ig- probably are. (In Latin, that is.)

@ktm5124 I don't know anything about Latin sorry :P

e.g. indignitas and ignomen.

But you know English! indignitas = against dignity and ignomen = against the name.

@ktm5124 Yeah, that's where our English in- comes from: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in-#Latin

indignity and ignominy.

ignomen (ignominy) may have started out as innomen but then phonological changes added a stop before the second syllable.

@ktm5124 The technical term is assimilation. So a prefix like in- would be written phonemically as /iN-/ with N standing for a nasal. (But because it also has allomorphs il- and ir- maybe it should even be written as /iC-/

Or would it be dissimilation, in the case of innomen?

Because the n becomes a g, which is dissimilar to the following consonant. But in the case of abduco, the b gets assimilated to a d, giving us adduco.

abduco is actually a bad example, because this assimilation never really happened. Better would be apparo, which was initially adparo (d assimilated to p).

@curiousdannii Of note, although that one often gets cast as a Chinese thing, the dialects I'm aware of (Mandarin and Shanghai, less certain about Cantonese) can distinguish l/r just fine. It's really the Japanese (and apparently speakers of some language in PNG!) who can't.

@Susan Korean as well. It's probably areal.

@Susan @curiousdannii @ktm5124 I'm aware from personal experience that Chichewa speakers (central Malawi) have a serious problem distinguishing L/R. I have my own set of amusing examples gathered at first-hand. ;) From Wikipedia:

> l and r are the same phoneme, representing a sound something between [l] and [r]. The spelling rules are to write 'r' after 'i' or 'e', except after a prefix, as in lilíme 'tongue'.

P.s., @Susan (and any other interested Hebraists): this looks interesting (EHLL article, recently uploaded on Academia.edu): "Biblical Hebrew: Periodization". FWIW.

@Dɑvïd That's interesting, do you visit Malawi often? Just last week my wife and I were hosting one of the couples behind the Learn2Serve programme which is training church leaders by the thousands out there.

Most of it was founded just a few years ago by somebody trained at one of the bible colleges up here in Scotland, it's pretty amazing how far they've gotten with it in such a short space of time

@Dɑvïd Interesting! L and R are both liquids, and in Greek, third declension nouns have a similar declension if they end on a liquid. There must be some intrinsic relation between these two phonemes, which has led them to be grouped as liquids.

Why are there two vowel "a" sounds in Hebrew? I don't know their proper names, but one looks like an underline and the other resembles a T.