Etic emic [These two terms are still very vague to After I read Ji Daohong’s book, I can understand them better, but because they are vaguely mentioned in Hu’s book, it seems very difficult for me to understand them – icywarmtea] Being etic means researchers’ making far too many, as well as behaviorally and inconsequential, differentiations, just as often the case with phonetics phonemics analysis in linguistics An emic set of speech acts and events must be one that is validated as meaningful via final resource to the native members of a speech community rather than via appeal to the investigator’s ingenuity or intuition Following the suffix formations of (phon)etics vs (phon)emics, these terms were introduced into the social sciences by Kenneth Pike (1967) to denote the distinction between the material and functional study of language: phonetics studies the acoustically measurable and articulatorily definable immediate sound utterances, whereas phonemics analyzes the specific selection each language makes from that universal catalogue from a functional aspe