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

From:Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 30, 2001, 13:46
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=-