Re: Phonetics vs. Phonemics

Quoting Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>:

> On 2/25/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
> > I could really do with a GOOD
> > website offering exact pronunciations of all vowels
> > recognised in the IPA in a number of different contexts.
> > Is there anything like that available anywhere?
>
> That's impossible.
>
> The IPA has a finite number of symbols, but the human speech apparatus
> is capable of producing a far greater range of nuances, so it's not
> possible to say that, for example, [e] is *exactly* this or that
> sound.
>
> As far as I know, IPA encodes only sounds which are considered
> distinctive/phonemic in at least one language.
We-ell, it approximately does that. I've never heard of a language that
contrasts [x] and [x\] (IPA hooktop heng), frex, but they've got different IPA
symbols.

OTOH, some sounds that are distinctive in some languages have to be indicated
wth of diacritics - the dental stops of Tamil comes to mind.

                                                             Andreas