A phoneme is a sound, or set of similar speech sounds, which are perceived as a single distinctive sound by speakers of the language or dialect in question. Polish can have word-initial and word-medial clusters of up to four consonants, whereas word-final clusters can have up to five consonants. [8] (For nasality following other vowel nuclei, see § Allophony below.) That may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement: muzyka /ˈmuzɨka/ 'music' vs. muzyka /muˈzɨka/ - genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. Nasal vowels do not occur except before a fricative and in word-final position. The latter changes came to be incorporated into the standard language only in the case of long o and the long nasal vowel, mostly for vowels located before voiced obstruents. Slovak 11 37 4 In Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless. Similarly palatalized s, z, n became the sounds ś, ź, ń. For example, fizyka (/ˈfizɨka/) ('physics') is stressed on the first syllable. For example, the "c/k" sounds in cat and kitten represent the English phoneme /k/. Note that American English has between 4 and 6 vowels less than British English (Received Pronunciation). Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were a single word. Vowel nasality in Polish is partially preserved from Proto-Slavic, having been lost in most other modern Slavic languages. Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy etc. The palatalized velars /kʲ/, /ɡʲ/ and /xʲ/ might also be regarded as soft on this basis. However, /i/ appears outside its usual positions in some foreign-derived words, as in czipsy ('potato chips') and tir ('large lorry', see TIR). Numbers in brackets indicate vowels or consonants found only in dialects or loan words. According to prescriptive grammars, the same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech (so zrobiliśmy 'we did' is said to be correctly stressed on the second syllable, although in practice it is commonly stressed on the third as zrobiliśmy). For example: *dьnь became dzień ('day'), while *dьnьmъ became dniem ('day' instr.). 8. For example, dach ('roof') is [ˈdax], but dach domu ('roof of the house') is [daɣ ˈdɔmu]. The historical palatalized forms of some consonants have developed in Polish into noticeably different sounds: historical palatalized t, d, r have become the sounds now represented by ć, dź, rz respectively. [26] [ɫ̪] and [lʲ] are also common realizations in native speakers of Polish from Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. They may therefore also be transcribed phonetically with the symbols ⟨ʐ̠⟩ etc., indicating the laminal feature. To determine (based on the spelling of the words) whether a given cluster has voiced or voiceless obstruents, the last obstruent in the cluster, excluding w or rz (but including ż), should be examined to see if appears to be voiced or voiceless. /x/ has a voiced allophone [ɣ], which occurs whenever /x/ is followed by a voiced obstruent (even across a word boundary), in accordance with the rules given under § Voicing and devoicing below. Therefore, they are phonetically diphthongs. When the letters ą and ę appear before stops and affricates, they indicate an oral /ɔ/ or /ɛ/ followed by a nasal consonant homorganic with the following consonant. The phonological system of the Polish language is similar in many ways to those of other Slavic languages, although there are some characteristic features found in only a few other languages of the family, such as contrasting retroflex and palatal fricatives and affricates, and nasal vowels. Former long /eː/ was written é until the 19th century (á for former long /aː/ was already in disuse).