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

> >     These two vowels are so different that one may as well be an
> > obstruent.
> > I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly mix these two up,
> whereas mixing
> > up [e] and [E] doesn't seem unreasonable to me.  I'm beginning to
> think it's just my ears...
Oh, it is.  I can very clearly distinguish [e] and [E], but the back
vowels are much more difficult for me.  In fact, I'd long thought that I
couldn't distinguish [o] and [O] at all, but I could keep those two
distinct from [Q] (low rounded back vowel).  Then I took phonetics, and
my phonetics teacher proved to me that in fact I *could* distinguish [o]
from [O], but I had been confusing [O] with [Q].  So now I'm baffled anew
by the back vowels, but fortunately no language I've learned yet
distinguishes [O] from [Q].

> :-)  It happens with my ears, too, but that's because of my dialect
> (?) of English, which differentiates between [o] and [O] but neglects
[e]
> and [E]
I curious--could you supply a minimal pair for [o] and [O]?  I don't want
to start another interminable debate on English phonetics, but I'm
curious to see which pair of sounds you're splitting up that way.  Also,
how do you pronounce "get" versus "gate."  I'm guessing [gEt] / [gEIt],
whereas I clearly have [geIt] for the second one, with the first part of
the diphthong raised.


Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
jaspax@ juno.com
"We couldn't all be cowboys
Some of us are clowns" --Counting Crows

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