Category talk:Audio files of phoneme samples

Since phonemes are abstract classes of speech sounds, you cannot have sound samples of phonemes. Thus the name of this category is misnomer.

It is also bewildering to newcomers who are lead to believe phonemes were sounds.

In fact, you can only have sound samples of concrete phones (versus abstract phonemes), which in turn can be members of phonemes. Since phonemes are differing grossly between languages, and often between dialects, you cannot have phonemes without saying to which language they belong. For instance, while for most Chinese speakers [ɹ] and [l] are represetatives, or members of, the same phoneme /L/, these phones comprise different phonemes in English. The words [ɹɔt] 'rott' and [lɔt] 'lot' are different in English, while there is only one word in Chinese which can be pronunced either way.

So, either this category needs to be renamed "Audio files of phone samples", or we need a parent category "Audio files of phoneme samples" having subcategories such as "Audio files of sample phones of English phonemes", "Audio files of samples phones of Chinese phonemes", etc. --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 08:57, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Hear hear! — Hippietrail (talk) 23:44, 10 June 2014 (UTC)