biology

Phememe

Phememe is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Phememe rather than just read about it. In short: A phememe (from Ancient Greek wikt:φημί ‘I speak, say’) is a hypothesized speech sound with an abstract gestural meaning, proposed by the linguist Mary LeCron Foster. According to Foster, phememes were the fundamental building block of the earliest human spoken language (Primordial Language), as opposed to the phonemes of attested languages, contemporary or historical.

Key takeaways

Phememe belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Phememe to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Phememe from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

A phememe (from Ancient Greek wikt:φημί ‘I speak, say’) is a hypothesized speech sound with an abstract gestural meaning, proposed by the linguist Mary LeCron Foster. According to Foster, phememes were the fundamental building block of the earliest human spoken language (Primordial Language), as opposed to the phonemes of attested languages, contemporary or historical. The phememe concept is thus important in the debate regarding the gestural origin of speech. By way of an example, the sound [m], as a meaningful oral gesture, is understood as pointing to “two opposed surfaces in tapering, pressing together, holding together, crushing, or resting against”. Reflexes of this primordial [m], and its original meaning, are found in ostensibly unrelated present-day languages in words referring to the mouth, the female genitals, and semantic extensions of these, e.g. Latin mugio ‘to moo, bugle’, mutus ‘mute’, mucus ‘mucous’, Japanese mugon ‘silence, muteness’, Dravidian muka- ‘face, mouth’, Piro (Arawak) musi- ‘to be pregnant, impregnate’. According to her most recent published work, Foster proposes that the phememic system of primordial spoken language consisted of the following phememes.

The philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone makes extensive use of Foster's concept of the phememe in arguing iconicity to be the foundation of the symbolic process. Earl R. Anderson points out that the phememe is thus an elaboration of earlier theories postulating a role for oral gesture in the origin of spoken language, such as those of the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who called his method generative philology. An implication of the phememe hypothesis is that Primordial Language lacked double articulation, which the American linguist Charles F. Hockett proposed as a central design feature of human language. According to this principle, linguistic signs are made up of building blocks, such as phonemes, which are themselves meaningless, e.g. cat is composed of the phonemes /k/, /æ/ and /t/. Phememes came to be desemanticized and replaced by meaningless phonemes in later evolution. The anthropologist Gordon Hewes proposes that this shift was motivated by the advantages phonemes entail in rapid word retrieval.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Phememe

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Phememe claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Phememe before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Phememe ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Phememe

In research: Phememe appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Phememe in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Phememe is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Evolution of language, Philosophy of language, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Phememe outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Phememe in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Phememe means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Phememe out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Phememe in simple terms?

Why does Phememe matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Phememe?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Phememe.