A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

[stoutfellow]

The passage below is from David Weber's Ashes of Victory. A (supposed) xenolinguist is speaking to a non-linguist.

What we call a 'phoneme' is the smallest bit of sound that may change or alter meaning, which usually means a vowel or consonant, and phonemes vary from language to language... In Spanish, the 'sp' phoneme never begins a word; in Standard English, however, that's quite a common beginning sound.

I know there's at least one person who reads this who will understand my exasperation.