Quotes About Phonemes

The Proto-Semitic phonological system contains perhaps twenty-nine consonantal phonemes, which despite certain modifications have been conserved with great fidelity in languages like Arabic.

Some of the more outstanding features of Ugaritic are its preservation of most of the Proto-Semitic consonantal phonemes.

The number of vowel phonemes varies according to the different Masoretic traditions.

Our new routine didn't require a stage or a microphone. Comedy isn't just words, syllables, phonemes. It's not just parking meters and airplane food and bad weather and tired punchlines. It's seeing what no one else sees and saying what no one else wants to say.

Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up.

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.