Fonémát

Fonémát is the Hungarian accusative form of fonéma, the term used in linguistics for the phoneme. The base noun fonéma denotes the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish meaning in a language. In Hungarian grammar, fonéma appears with nominative form as fonéma and accusative form as fonémát, used when the word is the direct object of a sentence. The word is common in Hungarian-language explanations of phonology as well as in general linguistic discussions.

A phoneme is an abstract mental unit that underlies a set of speech sounds treated as the same sound by speakers of a language. Phonemes are defined by their ability to distinguish words, unlike allophones, which are context-dependent variants of the same phoneme that do not change meaning. The same phoneme can be realized by different phonetic sounds in different contexts, and these realizations are called allophones.

Phonemes are studied within phonology, which describes inventories of phonemes for a language and the rules that govern their combinations and distribution. They interact with orthography, because writing systems encode phonemes through graphemes, though the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes varies across languages. Some languages have phonemic distinctions not present in others, and some orthographies reflect phonology more directly than others.

Examples often cited include the English contrast between the phonemes /p/ and /b/, which yields minimal pairs such as pat and bat. In Hungarian, features like vowel length can be phonemic, meaning long and short vowels may distinguish words and are represented in writing with diacritics or letter length differences. This illustrates how phonemes organize sound systems and influence written language.