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 :) .
Ok, I think I've got it. If I'm wrong, tell me. I'm providing words that sound
right for them in my dialect of english for them. Think East mid-atlantic.

a /9/  = 'a' in sad
o /u:/ = 'o' in do
e /@/  = final 'e' in Nietzsche
ä /e:/ = 'a' in came
ö /o:/ = 'o' in cold
ë /i:/ = 'ee' in been

Vowels are not my thing.

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=-

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