Back مدة (لسانيات) Arabic Kronem Breton Chronem German Kroneemi Finnish Chronème French 長音素 Japanese Chroneem Dutch 时位 Chinese
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In linguistics, a chroneme is an abstract phonological suprasegmental feature used to signify contrastive differences in the length of speech sounds. Both consonants and vowels can be viewed as displaying this features.[1] The noun chroneme is derived from Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) 'time', and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme or morpheme. Two words with different meaning that are spoken exactly the same except for length of one segment are considered a minimal pair.[2] The term was coined by the British phonetician Daniel Jones to avoid using the term phoneme to characterize a feature above the segmental level.[3]
The term is not widely used today, and in the case of English phonetics, Jones' analysis of long and short vowels (e.g. the /iː/ of bead and the /ɪ/ of bit ) as distinguished only by the chroneme is now described as "no longer tenable".[4]
Languages can have differences in length of vowels or consonants, but in most of them these differences aren not used phonemically or phonologically as distinctive or contrastive. Even in those languages which do have phonologically contrastive length, a chroneme is only posited in particular languages. Use of a chroneme views /aː/ as being composed of two segments: /a/ and /ː/, whereas in a particular analysis, /aː/ may be considered a single segment with length being one of its features. This may be compared to the analysis of a diphthong like [ai] as a single segment /ai/ or as the sequence of a vowel and consonant: /aj/.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) denotes length by doubling the letter or by diacritics above or after the letters:
| symbol | position | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| none | - | short |
| ː | after | long |
| ˑ | after | half-long |
| ˘ | above | extra-short |
- ^ Crystal, David, ed. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. The language library (6th ed.). Blackwell Publishing. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-405-15296-9.
- ^ Jones, Daniel (1944). "Chronemes and tonemes: (a contribution to the study of the theory of phonemes)". Acta Linguistica. 4 (1): 11–10. doi:10.1080/03740463.1944.10410902. ISSN 0105-001X.
- ^ Barry, William J. (2006). "The Phoneme". In Brown, Keith (ed.). Encyclopedia of language & linguistics (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-08-044854-1.
- ^ Gimson, A.C. (1977-04-01). "Daniel Jones and standards of English pronunciation". English Studies. 58 (2): 151–158. doi:10.1080/00138387708597818. ISSN 0013-838X.