Re: Newbie here

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >
> > > My name is Andreas Johansson (pronounced [andre:as juan:son], front a's
> > > please), I'm a 19 years old Swede. I'm studying Natural
> >
> ><guilty look>  I still can't differentiate some subtle vowels
> >distinctions, but thank goodness for email.
>
> If the a's are like the first part of the diphthong in English "eye" it's
> right. If they sound like a short version of the a in "father" I'll be
> slightly unhappy. But no worries - the worst thing that can happen is that
> your a's get across as /o/'s to my Swedish ears!
<wry g>  Heh--you should see some of the mangle-ations they do to my
sister's "middle" name, Kyung.  (Commonest mistake is to use /k_h/ or /g/
instead of /k/.)

> >/m/ doesn't do any sort of complementary distribution thing?  Just
> >wondering.
>
> I'm not entirely sure what you mean. The /m/ PHONEME can only occure
> initially. The SOUND [m] also occures medially as an allophone of the /n/
> morpheme when before /b/ or /p/. /m/ and /n/ can contrast initially, eg
> _mek_ "yellow" and _nek_ "spaceport".
Interesting.  :-)  Yes, it does.

YHL