살 and 쌀 are the same word

That’s not how allophones work. As a German native speaker, I have problems with the English vowel system and voice consonants in coda position (end of the syllable), still you won’t find me making a meme how bad, bat, bed, bet are all the same and allophones. Maybe self ironic “they are the same picture” but not using a scientific word wrongly. This is a meme community and I’m happy there are posts at all, but this isn’t for bet linguistics. We are better than that.

If English does not distinguish between the ㅅ in “soft” and the ㅆ in “sun” then wouldn’t we say those distinct consonants are allophones? The body text is literally the “they are the same picture” meme since 살 and 쌀 are obviously and notoriously different words that are only distinguished by the one consonant and are usually the go-to word pair for a native to again try to distinguish the sounds that I’ve been unable to distinguish for over a decade. I’m gonna cry.

If English does not distinguish between the ㅅ in “soft” and the ㅆ in “sun” then wouldn’t we say those distinct consonants are allophones?

If the sound represented by ㅆ [s͈] even appears in English (I have my doubts), they would be allophones in English, while in Korean they’re distinctive sounds associated with different phonemes. Like, what one language considers allophones doesn’t coincide with what another does, you know?

And what you posted in the OP proves that they aren’t allophones in Korean, as their difference conveys different words.

I think you understand what I mean but something about how I wrote it confused you. Would it make more sense if instead of “language” I said “native language”?

Yes, both ㅅ and ㅆ occur in English, that’s why some English words are represented by one consonant or the other when written in Hangul. Yes, they are allophones in English. Yes, they are NOT allophones in Korean. And, yep! This meme is about how an L1 English speaker struggles to distinguish the two consonants when speaking Korean.

Does that make sense? I’m not sure which part suggested that they would be allophones in Korean - I guess I assumed too much context >_< The reason it’s so damn hard to learn the difference is partially because the 살/쌀 dichotomy isn’t as well-known to non-natives, I guess.

I think that the big key here is to highlight that allophones are language-dependent, like you’re doing in this comment already. And yes, the meme does make sense now!

Hawaiian has barely any consonants, so k, k^h, g, g^h, q, t, d, ʈ, … are all allophones no matter which language we are talking about? That’s not how this works. It would work when talking about words loaned into Hawaiian but not when talking about another language altogether.

And allophones aren’t necessarily difficult to distinguish. German has 2 versions of <ch> ([x] and [ç]) depending on the preceding vowel. Also we have quite a few realizations of /r/ (not as many of Dutch though) easy to tell apart and deduct roughly where someone is from. You’re just using the word wrong.

are all allophones no matter which language we are talking about?

I don’t know where you got the impression that I said that if something is an allophone in one language it’s an allophone in all languages. Jeez!

I don’t know where you got the impression that I said that if something is an allophone in one language it’s an allophone in all languages. Jeez!

I think that this impression is mostly from the fact that your post doesn’t make any reference to English (or another language lacking the distinction), so people are incorrectly associating what you said with Korean instead, and incorrectly assuming ignorance.

I don’t think that people would misread you if the meme said

“When you have to distinguish two sounds from a language that are allophones in yours”. // 살 and 쌀 sound the same for me!

That said, I fully agree with you that people aren’t spending enough time trying to understand each other here.

Ah, thanks for the info (from another comment) on Korean rendering some English /s/ as one or another consonant! It hints that English at least comes close to the tense-S in some situations.

Thank you! Good communication tips. Sometimes I try to broaden my language to let it apply to more situations but I think it can just end up sounding detached and confusing.

But English is measure of all things?

You still seem to think that allophone is when they sound the same. That’s not even part of the definition. In my last comment I elaborated about allophones that sound quite distinct for native speakers. Let me now explain what allophone really is:

One straightforward definition (that has its flaws) is that allophone is when there are no minimal pairs. You literally gave a minimal pair.

You can even have two identical phones belonging to different phonemes. German devoices final consonants so /d/ has the allophones [d] and [t^h]. In effect, “Rat” and “Rad” both have final [t^h] while being allophones of /t/ and /d/ respectively.

I gave a minimal pair in Korean because they are not allophones in Korean. Your first instinct, “They’re the same picture” was spot on. To an English speaker, they’re the same sound. There are no minimal pairs in English. So… ah forget it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

I just wish people spent more time trying to understand what others mean instead of more time on why they think others are wrong. Isn’t that why we love linguistics to begin with??

I just wish people spent more time trying to understand what others mean instead of more time on why they think others are wrong.

As I have aged, this lament has come to characterize about 84% of my worldview.

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