PHONEMES INTRODUCTION.

Phonemes in linguistics are considered the smallest unit of sounds that serve to distinguish words from each other; it is also a meaningful word that may change one word into another one. A phoneme has more than one variant, called allophones, for example, which functions as a single sound and the general representation of phonemes are in slant brackets which is the standard to indicate a phoneme.

GENERAL ASPECTS.

It must be said that a phoneme represents a sound and they can be distinguished in English. However we have to mention that even when the word is the same. The sound changes, so that the production of the sound of this word is not exactly the same and for each phoneme that we can find it can be said that it is produced in a typical way because the sound of all the phonemes in English are produced by the lungs air, which is pushed out, but this sounds can be produced in two ways: -one of the sound is by vibrating the vocal cords, two muscular folds of skin low down in the throat which can be made to vibrate and the vibration ca be changed within limits. -the second one by altering the positions of components of the throat and mouth between the vocal cords and the exit of air and its in here where those alterations modify the note produced because the size of the cavity changes.

When lung air passes near (over) the vocal cords, which vibrate, and then it passes free out of the mouth, the sounds are called vowels and these sounds can continue until you stop breathing. In different English dialects vowels are variable as the position of the tongue and lips and it vary in the vowel phonemes used. English dialects vary greatly in the vowel phonemes used. In particular, American English differs between British English. This is important because the English speech and the synthesis of the grammar sentences and without leaving aside the positions of the lips and tongue that both alter the size and shape of the cavity that produces different sounds. Stops: By contrasting with the vowels, some sounds are made by the complete stop of the air and then releasing the flow of air out of the mouth. And these sounds are called stops (or best known as plosives). Nasals: it happens when the air is allowed to flow out of the nose while it is stopped in the mouth, and the result is nasal stops. English has three such phonemes that correspond to same three stopping positions as ordinary stops. Fricative: when the air is not completely stopped from out of the mouth, but if pass through a passage, the friction sound (fricative) is produced and these sounds correspond to the voiceless phonemes. Approximants: In these phonemes is where the tongue closes the air stream. Affricatives The phonemes that begin and end church and judge are voiceless and voiced affricatives respectively, composed of a very fast combination of a stop and a fricative A phone can be defined as a unit sound of a language. It is a unit sound because the whole of the phone must be substituted to make a difference

and also different word that is a unit sound in English, and hence a phone, because the whole of it has to be replaced

As it was mentioned at the beginning of the report phonemes have many variants and one of the most important of these variants is the allophones, the allophone of a phoneme form a set of sounds that do not change the meaning, are all very similar to one another, and occur in contexts different from one another, for one thing the syllable initial is opposed to the syllable that is final that have a difference with the phonemes ,which functions as a single sound that may differ phonetically, but that difference, determined by context, has no important significance in English. A grapheme in linguistic is described as the "smallest contrastive linguistic unit which bring us about a change of meaning is other variant of the phonemes the function of the graphemes is that they are number of letters that represent a sound, which is a phoneme, so that they are the letter that spell a sound in a word as the basic unit of written language. The name grapheme is given to the letter or combination of letters that represents a phoneme. There are three important differences in phonemes, the first one that refers to about phonemes do not depend on differences, the time is not always the same, which means that during time is possible to vary, between the lip opening and when the vocal begins and the vibration and it is important to mention that this action must happen less than 30 milliseconds English speakers hear, but only very close to the boundary time of the report hearing and is in where the discreteness of phonemes (phone) is a property of the listener, but in this case not of the sound by generating words and speech sounds artificially in the way just mentioned.

Secondly, phoneme boundaries vary between languages, for instance in Both German and French have distinct /b/ and /p/ phonemes). However, the precise boundary between the allophones of /b/ and those of /p/ is different. In the case of the /b/ phoneme, some German speakers tolerate longer interval between the lip opening and the vibration of the vocal cord, beginning than most French speakers, which makes a big difference in English speakers about the phoneme boundary and during the lip opening. Thirdly and the last one phonemes are specific to languages. In English, there is only one /p/ phoneme, but it has two allophones, [p] and [p], used in different positions within words. Thus an English speaker will find it difficult to hear. In conclution of these three important rule about phonemes natives speakers of a language hear the phonemes, but instead of talk phonemes they speak allophones, which is known as an interconversion of phones to phonemes.

CONCLUTION. The function of phones in linguistic (English language) is to distinguish the minimal and the smallest unit of sounds, which is the basic speech of the language and a word that may change one word into another one, They are used for any language to determine which are the differences in sound functions and either to indicate a difference in meaning, so that in English the difference in sounds and meanings which are perceived to have the same function for speakers of the language or dialect (in English) in question. In some languages, each of this letter in the spelling system represents one phoneme. However, in English spelling there is a not a big match between spelling and phonemes as in other languages.

BIBLIOGRAPHI. - Larry H. Small, Fundamentals of Phonetics: A Practical Guide for Students, pearson 2011. 400 p. - peter ladefoged, a course in phonetics, cengage larning 2010, 338 p. - Jacqueline Bauman, Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology: From Concepts to Transcription, Pearson 2008, 480 p. - Fletcher, P. and B. MacWhinney (1994), The Handbook of Child Language, Oxford: Blackwell. 159 p. - Laver, John (1994), Principle of Phonetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 167 p.