Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2016 9) 620-624 ~ ~ ~ УДК 81.34, 81.37 The Phoneme and the Phonotype Olga I. Brodovich* Institute of Foreign Languages 12 Linija Vassilievsky Island, 13, St. Petersburg, 199178, Russia Received 14.12.2015, received in revised form 10.02.2016, accepted 24.02.2016 The paper has as its aim to show that in cases of sound symbolism and onomatopoeia the meaningful entities are not phonemes in the entirety of their phonetic features, but concrete features refl ecting the sound-shape or other properties of the object designated. <...> Also shown is the similarity and difference of sound symbolism in a word and that in a (literary) text. <...> Introduction While the notion of phoneme is well known to all linguists, the term phonotype, being a comparatively new one, stands in need of explanation. <...> It was introduced by professor Stanislav Voronin, the founder of phonosemantics as a branch of the linguistic science sui generis. <...> The term was introduced to designate the principal unit of phonosemantics. <...> Its original terminological shape was phonemotype (vide Voronin, 1969, 12), but it was consequently changed to phonotype (Voronin, 1998, 9), the latter name better suiting the notion in question. <...> From Phonemotype to Phonotype Meeting of In his paper presented at the Fifteenth the Language Origins Society in © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: olgabrodovich@yandex.ru # 620 # Naples in 1999 S. Voronin thus defi ned the term: Phonotype (acoustic or articulatory) is a speech sound type containing a phonetic feature type (acoustic or articulatory) homeomorphous with (i.e. similar to) the referent feature type (acoustic or non-acoustic) serving as basis for phonoiconic (onomatopoeic or sound-symbolic) nomination. (See also Voronin, 2005, 102-103.) Although the notion of a phonetic feature is included in this defi nition almost in passing, as it were, its true signifi cance cannot be overestimated. <...> The earlier term phonemotype suggested the idea that in the building of an iconic word the phoneme acts in its entirety, as the bunch of phonetic features. <...> The phonemes chosen to form words with this meaning often include Olga I. Brodovich. <...> The Phoneme and the Phonotype /u/ – not because it is a back vowel, but only because of its labialised articulation <...>