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

Quoting John Vertical <johnvertical@...>:

> >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)?
An Argentinian I met some years ago appeared to have [h] and [C] in free
variation as the realization of /x/ before front vowels. Can anyone familiar
with Argentinian Spanish say whether that's normal down there, or just was some
idiosyncrasy of his?

I also seem to recall hearing of a language where /k/ had a [G] allophone
between vowels, which, while easy to imaging diachronically, is a pretty stark
difference synchronically.

                                                         Andreas

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