Task 1: Phonetics, Phonology and Phonemes

Why are the words FAST and FEAST evidence that the sounds /ɑː/ and /iː/ are phonemes in English?

Add any information regarding the concept of phonemes drawn from a reliable source (please, quote it in your message).

You can comment on others' posts.

Phonemes are the smallest units of speech and it takes just one to completely differentiate two words otherwise very similar (especially if these two words, just like FAST and FEAST are made of just one syllable).

Phonemes are (according to):

- timeforphonics.co.uk
"The smallest unit of sound in the English language, and can be blended together to form words. Each phoneme is represented by a grapheme – which is a letter or a group of letters. Children learn about phonemes and graphemes when they start learning to read, and will also learn how phonemes and be blended together to make a word, and how words can be segmented in order for us to write them."

- oxfordreference.com
"The smallest sound unit in a language. Meaningless in themselves, phonemes are the building-blocks of language. Changing one for another changes the meaning of a word, as with /p/ and /b/ in pat and bat. The English language has only about forty or fifty phonemes but these can be combined to generate hundreds of thousands of words."

- oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com
"Any one of the set of smallest units of speech in a language that make the difference between one word and another. In English, the /s/ sound in sip and the /z/ sound in zip represent two different phonemes."

Definitions of the concept of phonemes are good and extensive, especially you quoted your sources (well done). Still, we haven't got an answer to the first question. How can we demonstrate that FAST and FEAST contain a different morpheme? Can anyone provide an answer and an explanation?

Diana Staiti ha scritto:Phonemes are the smallest units of speech and it takes just one to completely differentiate two words otherwise very similar (especially if these two words, just like FAST and FEAST are made of just one syllable).

Phonemes are (according to):

- timeforphonics.co.uk
"The smallest unit of sound in the English language, and can be blended together to form words. Each phoneme is represented by a grapheme – which is a letter or a group of letters. Children learn about phonemes and graphemes when they start learning to read, and will also learn how phonemes and be blended together to make a word, and how words can be segmented in order for us to write them."

- oxfordreference.com
"The smallest sound unit in a language. Meaningless in themselves, phonemes are the building-blocks of language. Changing one for another changes the meaning of a word, as with /p/ and /b/ in pat and bat. The English language has only about forty or fifty phonemes but these can be combined to generate hundreds of thousands of words."

- oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com
"Any one of the set of smallest units of speech in a language that make the difference between one word and another. In English, the /s/ sound in sip and the /z/ sound in zip represent two different phonemes."

Phonemes are the smaller units of sounds, they are the basic building blocks of a language's sound system, we can analyze words in terms of distinct, individual sounds. (according to "The Frameworks of English, Kim Ballard, Bloomsbury Academic)

Due the claim that "we can analyze words in terms of distinct individual sounds", we can test that in words such as Fast and Feast. The only difference between these two words is the vowel sound, and changing that vowel sound changes the meaning of the word. Quote from the book, page 227 " if a single sound substitution enables us to make a distinction between two different words, this is proof that the two sounds involved are both meaningful sounds in the language"
Therefore  /ɑː/ and /iː/ are considered distinct phonemes in English because they can create minimal pairs such as  FAST and FEAST