How many phonemes are in the word diskette?

Answer 1

My professor said that the answer is actually 6. Can someone explain, please? Thank you.

Phonemes are minimum units of distinctive sound. That is not the same as individual letters, though a phoneme may happen to correspond to a single letter.

If you say the word 'diskette' aloud, you will notice that you make 6 distinct sounds, which for simplicity I will represent by ordinary letters rather than phonetic symbols: d-i-s-k-e-t. Thus, the first 5 phonemes correspond to single letters, while the final phoneme, the 't' sound, is represented by 3 letters, 'tte'.

Some phonemes that always need more than one letter to be written down (in English) are the 'ch', 'sh' and 'th' sounds.

Some phonemes can be represented in several different ways, using one or more letters. For example, the vowel sound in the word 'meet', a long 'e' sound, can also be spelt 'ea', 'e', and 'ie' in various other words.

Answer 2

There are seven phonemes in the word "diskette": /d/, /ɪ/, /s/, /k/, /ɛ/, /t/, /ə/.