The phonologists of the Prague Circle tried to indicate some of these limitations of distribution by saying that a phoneme which does not occur in a given position is ‘neutralized’ by one which does, and that an ‘archiphoneme’ symbol can be written to represent either phoneme in that position. Thus /b/ and /p/ are neutralized after /s/, and can then be represented by the archiphoneme 'P', which would indicate the ‘common element’ of both: /sPin/ instead of /spin/.
- Harris (1944), a pag.183