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

From: "David Peterson" <DigitalScream@...>
> In a message dated 10/31/01 11:04:14 PM, and_yo@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
> << (much
> more so than for instance [o] and [O]) >>
>
>     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...
Well, that's how phonemes work... You learn a set of boxes with particular
labels, and everything that doesn't fit that label exactly goes into something
close to it.

(What's fun is pronouncing palatal stops for native and solely-English speaking
people and asking them to spell them...)

For me [e] and [E] is easy... I understand the tenseness/laxness somehow and I
generally get it (even though I still think "tense" and "lax" are backwards
labels, like I used to think about "front" and "back"[1] and still do about
"soft" and "hard" for voiced and voiceless...)

But for some reason the difference between [o] and [O] just doesn't click at me.
I have the little IPA-help program to say the sounds for me[2] and I guess
there's a difference, but I'm still not sure how to pronounce the difference,
and I doubt I could recognize them if they didn't have labels on them saying
what they are...

(And this is also tough for me because I can't tell whether my lang Dunamy has a
difference between [o] and [O] or not!)

    *Muke!

[1] Probably because back vowels usually got rounded too, and it's hard to get
fronter than lip-rounding without whistling...