Abstract
AT the recent International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, many of the papers contained discussions of phonemes and phonology. There were nearly as many definitions of a phoneme as there were papers, and nobody seemed to have any clear idea of what was meant by the term. The hope was expressed that perhaps the psychologists might be able to discover what a phoneme is. At the Congress dinner, one speaker compared the hunting of the phoneme to the hunting of the snark—with the difference that at least there was a snark. Apparently the phoneme was smiled out of existence. This, however, was not the fault of the phoneme, but of the hunters who failed to find it. The nature of language shows that phonemes do exist, and the successful study of language requires that they shall be found.
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SCRIPTURE, E. Phonemes. Nature 136, 261–262 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136261c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136261c0
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