Re: The existence of low, rounded vowels

Dan Seriff wrote:

>Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>
>> In class today, my German teacher told us that there's no such thing as
low,
>> rounded vowels. Yet, I seem to be able to produce such (remember that
thread
>> on the "OE" sound?), and they do occur in my vowel charts (two ones to be
>> exact - the front "OE" sound and [Q]).
>>
>> Now, is there anyone who's got an idea as to why the teacher 'd say that
>> these vowels don't exist? Apart from they being uncommon? Is there, for
>> instance, a tendency that they're not quite as low as [a] and [A] (so you
>> could described them as "almost low" or something like that)?
>
>Actually, if I round the vowel [A] in "father", it ends up being just a
>little *lower* and farther forward than [A]. This is the turned cursive
><a>, represented by ascii [A.]. I think your German teacher is quite
>wrong on this count. Maybe this teacher was referring to Standard German
>only, in which case they'd be quite correct. Apparently (according to
>Ladefoged and Maddieson), the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian has this
>vowel, but I can't find any other examples.
>
Andreas:  perhaps your teacher was denying the existence of LOW FRONT
rounded vowels??? IIRC the IPA chart has a rounded counterpart for i, I, e,
E (y, small cap Y, OE, o-slash) but none for AE (æ)-- but nothing prevents
one from rounding the lips while pronouncing [æ].  Apparently such a sound
occurs in some dialect of German/Austrian (I read the paper over 30 years
ago)-- it was the umlauted form of one of the Low Back Vowels.  Probably
very rare in languages of the world.  (The writer of the paper considered it
quite a discovery too, for theoretical reasons which I forget-- something
about too many contrastive vowel heights?)   There is probably a physical or
acoustic reason for the rarity-- with the mouth relatively wide open, lip
rounding isn't going to make a lot of difference to the hearer.

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