[Phonology] Allophone Problems

in order to really drill in the concept of phonemes and allophones we're going to do a few problems the first problem we're going to look at is in English and it is the difference between an N and an M so you probably didn't hear much of a difference between these two sounds but

the on the left is your standard alveolar N and the N on the right is a dentalized n this means that your tongue is closer to your teeth so let's take a look at a dataset you we have the word knife new and fain and these all have our standard alveolar mm but in the word

month billionth and Panther that mm is fronted more towards the teeth so it sounds more like a mmm and the question is of course are these different phonemes or are these allophones of the same phoneme well we don't have any minimal pairs here so for instance if I were to even change knife to be pronounced as knife

you don't hear it as a separate word with a completely different meaning you didn't think that Oh what was that made-up word he just said no you still had it as an N so in English when you have an intuitive judgment about it you can kind of make those connections of course on a real data set you just have

to go with what you see and we don't see any minimal pairs so the question is are these allophones and we need to check and say well what environments is this end with the dental occurring and what environments is the regular end occurring in okay well if we look at say knife new and fain well knife listen

occurs at the beginning of a word so for instance if we were to draw a chart of when this occurs we could say it occurs at the beginning of the word which we put with a hashtag meaning word and then a line to say oh it's the N is there and then an eye comes after it and new well