Re: More Ere:tas: The fable of the North Wind and the Sun

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
>> I really must get a proper grasp of how to do vowels properly in IPA.
>> The vowels are roughly (and I'm not sure this is entirely correct or
>> even realistic as far as vowel systems go):
>>
>> a = /@/
>> o = /u:/
>> e = /E/
>> ä = /e:/
>> ö = /o:/
>> ë = /i:/
>>
>No /a/? Although Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed without /a/ (it is
>reconstructed with a single vowel which can be /e/, /o/ or null, depending on
>grammatical and semantic features, but of course nobody can really tell what
>the actual phonetic content was, if it really existed), no language in the
>world that we know of seems to lack this vowel. Even some Caucasian languages
>which can be argued to have only two vowels have /a/ and /@/. But of course,
>among all the languages that were lost without us knowing anything about them,
>maybe there were some lacking an /a/. We can never be sure of anything :) .
I don't think it must be absolutely necessary to have everything, and especially
less so to adjust it because "everybody else is doing it".

(Also my Hungarian book says it only has long /a:/, the short version being
/O/... dunno if that's right.  I understand Sanskrit was something similar...
English even hasn't got /a/, though other low vowels like /A/ and /&/...)

Oh, and this is useful anyway:
"segmental phonemes of the world's major languages"
http://www.axxess.net/~ram/segmental_phonemes.png
(or .ps if you can read that)

    *Muke!

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