Abstract
The best way to think about phonemes, phonological patterns (and words too) is that they are social products created by a human community. A speaking community is a complex adaptive system that creates over time a partially structured set of communicative sound patterns. Individual speakers are exposed to many of these patterns and imitate them as best they can. Their articulatory apparatus and speaking skills provide a logic for speech. But to perceive spoken language, a speaker has no choice but to induce its own idiosyncratic auditory version of linguistic conventions, a lexicon, phrases, idioms, constructions, etc. Typically the speaker does not have clear intuitions about any of the actual linguistic units. Of course, those of us who are literate have vivid orthographic model for a language based on the alphabet, a recently engineered technology. Ordinary speakers do not have any alphabet. But a language, as a social institution, has something somewhat alphabet-like.