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

On Tuesday, October 30, 2001, at 11:49 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:
>
>> 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)
>
> Interesting, though it makes a (IMHO) very big mistake: it states that
> only
> Korean has /M/ (back unrounded low vowel), but Japanese has it too, quite
> distinctively, and has no phonemic /u/ (in fact, I didn't even hear it as
> a
> phone. Whether it is in songs or in anime, it's very distinctively a /M/)
> ,
> unlike what it states. Does Korean have /u/ really?
:-)  Yes--it was one of the things that made Japanese /M/ easy to learn.

Korean has /M/ (it's the second-last non-compound vowel in the alphabet,
written as a horizontal line) and *also* /u/ (4th-last non-compound vowel
in the alphabet), written as a horizontal line with a short vertical
protrusion from the bottom.  Then again, Korean has a few more vowels than
Japanese (though not too many more; some of the alphabet-"vowels" involve
[j] and a number of the compounds involve [w] before existing vowel sounds,
  e.g. [ja] and [wa].)

YHL, glad of a question on Korean she can actually answer!

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

Computer: a device designed to speed and automate errors.