Editing Phoneme (section)

==Background and related ideas==
The term ''phonème'' (from {{langx|grc|φώνημα|phōnēma}}, "sound made, utterance, thing spoken, speech, language"<ref name="Liddell & Scott">Liddell, H.G. & Scott, R. (1940). ''A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie.'' Oxford: Clarendon Press.</ref>) was reportedly first used by [[A. Dufriche-Desgenettes]] in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound. The term ''phoneme'' as an [[abstraction]] was developed by the Polish linguist [[Jan Baudouin de Courtenay]] and his student [[Mikołaj Kruszewski]] during 1875–1895.{{sfn|Jones|1957}} The term used by these two was ''fonema'', the basic unit of what they called ''psychophonetics''. [[Daniel Jones (phonetician)|Daniel Jones]] became the first linguist in the western world to use the term ''phoneme'' in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language".<ref>Jones, D. (1917), The phonetic structure of the Sechuana language, Transactions of the Philological Society 1917-20, pp. 99–106</ref> The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of [[Nikolai Trubetzkoy]] and others of the [[Prague School]] (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of [[structuralism|structuralist]]s like [[Ferdinand de Saussure]], [[Edward Sapir]], and [[Leonard Bloomfield]]. Some structuralists (though not Sapir) rejected the idea of a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme.{{sfn|Twaddell|1935}}{{sfn|Harris|1951}}

Later, it was used and redefined in [[generative linguistics]], most famously by [[Noam Chomsky]] and [[Morris Halle]],{{sfn|Chomsky|Halle|1968}} and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern [[phonology]]. As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others.{{sfn|Clark|Yallop|1995|loc=chpt. 11}}

Some linguists (such as [[Roman Jakobson]] and [[Morris Halle]]) proposed that phonemes may be further decomposable into [[distinctive feature|feature]]s, such features being the true minimal constituents of language.{{sfn|Jakobson|Halle|1968}} Features overlap each other in time, as do [[suprasegmental]] phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be characterized in different ways: Jakobson and colleagues defined them in [[acoustic phonetics|acoustic]] terms,{{sfn|Jakobson|Fant|Halle|1952}} Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly [[articulatory phonetics|articulatory]] basis, though retaining some acoustic features, while [[Peter Ladefoged|Ladefoged]]'s system{{sfn|Ladefoged|2006|pp=268–276}} is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'.

In the description of some languages, the term [[chroneme]] has been used to indicate contrastive length or ''duration'' of phonemes. In languages in which [[tone (linguistics)|tones]] are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called [[toneme]]s. Though not all scholars working on such languages use these terms, they are by no means obsolete.

By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix ''-eme'', such as ''[[morpheme]]'' and ''[[grapheme]]''. These are sometimes called [[emic unit]]s. The latter term was first used by [[Kenneth Pike]], who also generalized the concepts of [[emic unit|emic and etic]] description (from ''phonemic'' and ''phonetic'' respectively) to applications outside linguistics.{{sfn|Pike|1967}}