1934/12/01 by Morris Swadesh
paper · doi:10.2307/409490
As is shown in my paper, ‘The Phonemic Principle’, the only completely satisfactory method of treating the sounds of a language is to classify them according to the elemental types, or phonemes, recognized by the given language and to describe the types in terms of norms and ranges of deviation. The present paper presents such a description. The phonetic techniques employed in the course of the study were aural observation and reproductive experiment (attempting to pronounce words after the informant and getting his reaction to the reproduction). Now these are the techniques employed successfully by children in acquiring their native languages, but also employed without complete success by abnormal children and by most adult foreigners. However, a trained phonetician may ordinarily be expected to succeed if he takes sufficient pains. The only real deficiency in these techniques is that they do not provide a means of describing sounds with final accuracy and objectivity (such as is possible when laboratory instruments are used). In the present case, I am limited to a rough indication of the norms of the different phonemic types and sub-types; the normal deviation is practically nowhere sufficiently great to be measurable by my ear.