Further Description
When phonemes are in free variation, speakers are sometimes strongly aware of the fact (especially where such variation is only visible across a dialectal or sociolectal divide), and will note, for example, that tomato is pronounced differently in British and American English, or that either has two pronunciations which are fairly randomly distributed. However, only a very small proportion of English words show such variations. In the case of allophones, however, free variation is exceedingly common, and, along with differing intonation patterns, variation in allophony is the most important single feature in the characterization of regional accents.
Read more about this topic: Free Variation
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)