phoneme vrs. allophone

[Darryl R�thering]

I'm a newcomer to this list, and maybe I am out of my depth, so apologies in
advance.

Could one of you linguists give an english (or Spanish) example of an
allophone? I'm having trouble concetizing this notion. I think the example
of a phoneme is simple, correct me if I'm wrong:
cat cad :> one sound difference, and a verifiable meaning difference.

Is an allophone something like the difference between Brittish /tomahto/ and
American /tomayto/? Or am I barking up a bad tree?

Regards,

Darryl
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