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

At 14:35 30/10/01 +0100, you wrote:
>En réponse à Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>:
>
> >
> > 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 :) .
Just as I got this post, I was getting odd looks from my flatmate for
making weird sounds - I'm trying to get the vowels right. The closest I seem
to be able to get is /&/ though...

K.

--
Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kmgaughan/
I can decide what I give / But it's not up to me / What I get given -=Bjork=-