Telephone

A telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into electronic signals suitable for transmission via cables or other transmission media over long distances, and replays such signals simultaneously in audible form to its user.

In 1876, Scottish emigrant Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice. This instrument was further developed by many others. The telephone was the first device in history that enabled people to talk directly with each other across large distances. Telephones rapidly became indispensable to businesses, government, and households, and are today some of the most widely used small appliances.

Phone (film)

Phone (Hangul: 폰; RR: Pon) is a 2002 South Korean horror film written and directed by Ahn Byeong-ki and starring Ha Ji-won and Kim Yoo-mi. The film is a complex and disturbing love story that involves possession and ghosts.

Plot

After writing a series of articles about a pedophilia scandal, journalist Ji-won receives threatening calls on her cellular and subsequently changes her number. Her close friend Ho-jung, who is infertile, and her husband Chang-hoon invite Ji-won to move to their empty house in Bang Bae that is newly furnished. When Ho-jung's daughter Young-ju answers an anonymous phone call on Ji-won's new cell phone, the girl screams and begins to show a disturbing attraction for her father and jealous rejection towards her mother. Meanwhile, Ji-won receives more mysterious phone calls and sees a teenager playing Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. After investigating her phone number, Ji-won discovers that the original owner of the number, Jin-hee, had vanished and that the two subsequent owners of the number had died mysteriously in unusual circumstances. Her further investigation about Jin-hee reveals that the teenage schoolgirl was obsessively in love with a man who had broken up with her.

Phone (phonetics)

In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether or not the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound that in a given language, if swapped with another phoneme, would change the meaning of the word. Phones are absolute, not specific to any language, while phonemes can only be discussed in reference to specific languages.

For example, the English words kid and kit end with two distinct phonemes, and swapping one for the other would change the word's meaning. However, the difference between the p sounds in pun (pʰ, with a puff of air) and spun (p, no puff of air) can never affect the meaning of a word in English, so they are phones and not phonemes. By contrast, swapping the same two sounds in Urdu can change one word into another: pʰal means 'fruit' and pal means 'moment' (CIIL 2008).

In the context of spoken languages, a phone is an unanalyzed sound of a language (Loos 1997). A phone is a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties, and serves as the basic unit of phonetic speech analysis. Phones are generally either vowels or consonants.