> I think that's a big problem with such lists, especially in the face
> of allophonic variation where the main allophone of a given phoneme
> just happens not to be what you're looking for.
>
> For example, the chart on
>
http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/segmental_phonemes.png looks a bit messy
> for [a] since it says only English misses that. Which is true enough
> as far as it goes, but I'd imagine that someone using [a] in English
> (say, for PALM) would still be understood;