Chroneme

Article summary

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. The noun chroneme is derived , 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. The term was coined by the British phonetician Daniel Jones to avoid using the term phoneme to characterize a feature above the segmental level. The term is not widely used today, and in the case of English phonetics, Jones' analysis of long and short vowels (e.g. the of bead and the of bit ) as distinguished only by the chroneme is now described as "no longer tenable". Languages can have differences in length of vowels or consonants, but in most of them these differences are 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 as being composed of two segments: and , whereas in a particular analysis, may be considered a single segment with length being one of its features.…

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