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I don't believe that phonemes are real. They are a product of centuries long literacy, and the stereotypically "foreign" accent results from people being taught to construct the words from phonemes.

Not all languages can be neatly split into a nice set of phonemes - Danish phonology in particular seems mostly imaginary, and the "insane grammar" of Old Irish appears to result from the fact that word/morpheme boundaries can occur within the "phonemes".

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> I don't believe that phonemes are real

I used to think the same until I came across the VQ-VAE paper [1], where the goal was to let the model learn the smallest units of speech without any supervision. Interestingly, the model ended up learning units that closely aligned with the phonemes we recognize today.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00937

The gibberish it produces shows that something quite different is being encoded.

It completely fails with Spanish. There is no reason why it would, if it used phonemes.

They think that the footnote explains the poor accuracy, but that is in fact how phonemes supposedly work.

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