Study of the phonemic system

It is sometimes helpful to think of the phonemic system as being similar to the set of cards used in a card game, or the set of pieces used in a game of chess. In chess, for example, the exact shape and color of the pieces are not important to the game as long as they can be reliably distinguished. But the number of pieces, the moves they can make and their relationship to all the other pieces are very important; we would say that if any of these were to be changed, the game would no longer be what we call chess. Similarly, playing cards can be printed in many different styles and sizes, but while changing these things does not affect the game played with them, if we were to remove one card from the pack or add one card to it before the start of a game, nobody would accept that we were playing the game correctly. In a similar way, we have a more or less fixed set of "pieces" (phonemes) with which to play the game of speaking English. There may be many slightly different realizations of the various phonemes, but the most important thing for communication is that we should be able to make use of the full set of phonemes.