Phonetics vs. Phonemics (was: apparently bizarre 'A's)

>As to phonetic symbology, you're right that I overstated the
>precision.  Each symbol covers a spectrum of similar sounds.  But the
>difference between phonetics and phonemics is that in the latter case
>the sounds represented by a single symbol are identified by their
>equivalence within a given language, and need not even be phonetically
>similar at all.
>Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
That reminds me - what's the most different allophones of a single phoneme
you know of (either qualitively or quantitively)? The /r/-variants from [r]
to [r\`] or [R] is a good try, obviously, but are there any other similar
cases? Like a vowel-poor language having /u/ in free variation from [u] all
the way down to [Q]? Or having only one POA-harmonizing nasal phoneme? (I've
seen that last one in a conlang somewhere, but not really in natlangs...
note that lone /n/ plus prenasalized stops isn't quite the same.)

(I think it's been suggested that English /h/ and /N/ would be the same
phoneme, but that's a little too far IMO.)

John Vertical

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