Re: Phone frequencies

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 04:17, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
> For consonants it's got the irritating feature that dentals and
> alveolars and unspecified dental/alveolars are all counted separately,
> though.
[...]
> For vowels the parallel irritation is that e.g. /e/ and /E/ and
> indifferent /e/~/E/ are counted separately;
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; English has [a]-like
vowels, just not one whose main allophone is precisely [a].

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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