Talk:Diphone

"a diphone is an adjacent pair of phones" - I thought a diphone was specifically from the center of one phone to the center of the adjacent one, ie two half-phones rather than two complete phones which this phrasing suggests. I suggest modifying the text to read "a diphone is formed from the two half-phones within an adjacent pair of phones, from the middle of one phone to the middle of its neighbor" or something equivalent.

In this context does "phones" mean the same thing as "phoneme"? There is an entry for phoneme but not for a phone. What do you all think? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.42.208.182 (talk • contribs) 01:13, 4 June 2004

In this context, the subsitution wouldn’t be a huge problem, no. But ‘phone’ does not mean ‘phoneme’. Phones are simply (speech) sounds, whereas phonemes are a particular theoretical construct that groups phones into categories which are considered non-distinct from the perspective of the language. So the phoneme /t/ can be realised with one of a number of phones in (some dialects of) English: [t] in ‘step’; [tʰ] in ‘ten’; [ʔ͡t̚] in ‘bet’; [ɾ] in ‘better’. Or in Australian English there’s two phones [ɔ̟ʉ] and [ɔu] which are considered to be one phoneme /əʉ/ because the former never occurs before /l/ (unless there’s some boundary between them), and the latter always occurs before /l/ (unless there’s some boundary between them). —Felix the Cassowary 07:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)