phoneme vrs. allophone

[Michael Mccafferty]

Phonemes are linguistically contrastive sounds (or sets of a language. And
like you pointed out, Darryl, such a contrast is typically indicated by
the existence of a minimal pair or what is often called these days
a contrast in an identical environment. As you note, minimal pairs are
pairs of words which differ only by a particular sound at a particular
(shared) location in the two word (eg. [mat] and [sat]). If two segments
cause such a difference in meaning in an identical environment then they
must belong to different phonemes, in this case /m/ and /s/.

As for allophones, these are variants of each phoneme that are usually
conditioned by the phonetic environment. For example /k/ is an English
phoneme, and [k'] and [k] are allophones of /k/. We find the first in
[k'at] 'cat'  and the second in [ski] 'ski'. The first is aspirated, the
second unaspirated.

So, a phoneme is a set of allophones. The allophones are actual realized
sound units while the phoneme is a set of those sounds that are usually in
what is called "complementary distribution." In other words,they are
"mutually exclusive." No native speaker of English says [kat] or [sk'i].
So, if two sounds are phonetically similarkl but are in complementary
distribution, they are considered allophones of a single phoneme.

tiquitta?

Michael