Re: new Klingon spelling

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 11:32:11AM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Is it? I don't speak any Romance language, but have heard most of them by
> > know, and the /a/'s usually sounds more like [a] than [A]. Indeed, I've
> met
> > hispanophones unable to tell [A:] from [o:].
>
> Er?  I thought the Spanish <a> was /A/ (IPA script a)?
If you're actually refering to phone_m_es (which your use of slashes suggest),
it's a moot point if you denote it as /a/ or /A/. But phone_t_ically, the
Spanish-speakers I know (who're all from Spain) use something closer to [a]
than to [A]. The Argentinian guy I met a couple of years ago (the one who, to
me amazingly, appears to have [h] and [C] in free variation) also had
something decidedly more [a]-like. But I'm not into Spanish phonetics - I do
not know what's majority usage or what the Real Academía says.

During a "let's teach one another a few useless phrases in one another's
languages" session down in Germany, [A:], to my surprise, caused the Spaniards
present more trouble than did [8].

                                                   Andreas