Phoneme vs. Sound

A Phoneme - is the shortest functional unit of language. Each phoneme exists in the form of mutually non-distinctive speech sounds, its allophones.
A sound - is a material unit, produced by speech organs. A sound can be viewed from the articulatory, acoustic, auditory and functional points of view. Each speech sound is an allophone of some phoneme.
Phonetics studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic unit, phonology investigates sounds as units which serve communicative purposes. The unit of phonetics is a speech sound. The unit of phonology is a phoneme. Phonemes can be discovered by the method of minimal pairs, which consists in finding pairs of words which differ in 1 phoneme:
Can -can ban - Ben
Fan - ban bad - bat
Foot - root sit - sing
Meet - feet late - hate
The phonemes of a language form a system of oppositions, in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least 1 position in at least 1 lexical or grammatical minimal pair.

Типы оппозиции, методы коммутации, дистрибуции. Дефиниции из лекций. Johnes

The phoneme theory was developed by Scherba (the head of the Leningrad Phonological School) who stated, that in actual speech we utter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of. These sounds are united in a comparatively small member of sound types, which are capable of distinguishing the meaning and the form of words (= they serve the purpose of soicial intercommunication). These sound types should be included into the classification of phonemes and studied as unit of language. The actually pronounced speech sounds are variants or allophones of phonemes. They are realized in concrete words. They have phonetic similarity: their acoustic and articulatory features have much incommon. And at the same time they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words. E.g.: the sound type or the vowel phoneme /i:/, which is defined as 'unrounded', fully front, high, narrow, tense, long, fill, is more back in 'key' than in 'eat' under the influence of the backlingual /k/, it's longer before a voices lenis consonant, than before a voiceless fortis one: seed - seat
greed - greet
The number of phonemes is much smaller than the number of sounds actually pronounced.
The Leningrad Phonological School defined phoneme as a real independent distinctive unit capable of differentiating meaning, which manifests itself in the form of allophones.
According to Vasiljev (who developed Shcherba's theory) a phoneme is a unity of 3 aspects:
1) it's material, real and objective (because it really exists in the material form of speech sounds, allophones)
2) it's abstractional, generalized (bcos we make it abstract from concrete realization)
3) it's functional (its function's to make one word of its grammatical form distinct from the other)
Moscow - Jakovlev, Kuznetsov, Sidorov consider a phoneme to be a part of morpheme. It's a dependent unit and it's true manifests itself in a morpheme. A phoneme has many allophones, depending upon the position of a phoneme in the sound chain (final, mid, initial, before/after this or that vowel/consonant).

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