contrastively/ the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. When there is a contrast in identical environment we must be dealing with separate phonemes - when we replace one sound with another, we get another word with another meaning, therefore that sound must be a phoneme. There are small shades of sounds that don't distinguish meaning phones. The different phones that are the realisations of the same phoneme are called allophones. Allophones - are the actual pronunciations of phonemes in different environments. Complementary distribution phonetic units that never occur in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution. For example, clear/l/ and dark/l/. NB! The sounds we produce and hear are continuous: we move our organs of speech continuously and produce a continuous signal still it is possible to divide speech into units, which is called segmentation. The sounds of languages can be produced by:
English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling.[3] The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English is in the value of the long vowels. Long vowels in Middle English had "continental" values much like those in Italian and Standard German, but in standard Modern English they have entirely different pronunciations. This change in pronunciation is known as the Great Vowel Shift.[5] (vt eraldi faili) What is the Great Vowel Shift? Middle English period: lengthening and shortening of vowels
Not all the human communications that N.S.A. studies are coded. Into the headquarters building at Fort Meade come recordings of the cleartext chatter between Soviet pilots. An N.S.A. section transcribes these, not into ordinary Russian writing, but into a phonetic representation that retains the pronunciation variations of the speakers. These transcription sheets go to analysts in another section. They compare the pilots' inflections with known dialectical pronunciations to determine where the men in a squadron come from. Long residence in one locality will sometimes shade an older pronunciation more toward the local one; the analysts can detect this and tell where the squadron is stationed. Slang and current phraseology assists in these determinations. When one pilot calls another "Ivan," and Ivan replies, the characteristics of his speech are carefully noted in an enormous file with all other Ivans so that future
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