Re: CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

En réponse à Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>:

>
> I gather people generally confuse front-rounded vowels with
> back-unrounded
> ones, since we usually only have either of them in our languages (except
> in
> cases of vowel harmony systems, e.g. Turkish); thus, English
> back-unrounded
> [V] gets nativized to [9], the front-rounded vowel of the same aperture,
> in
> languages like Icelandic, which has f-r vowels but no b-unr ones. I
> understand what you mean; prior to my introduction to b-unr vowels (esp.
> of
> the non-low sort), I'd have identified them as "skewed" versions of f-r
> ones (being a native f-r language speaker).
>
I have the same experience, being a native French speaker. I used to pronounce
/V/ as [9] before I understood the difference. Now, I'm working on pronouncing
the lax vowels correctly. I know succesfully make the difference between [i] and
[I], [&] begins to sound different in my ear than [a], but the difference
between [u] and [U] still escapes me (I was quite amused to hear the creator of
Uusisuom disclaim that there was a HUGE difference between the vowel in fOOt and
the vowel in bOOk. I've never heard the difference and I didn't even know there
was a difference...).

Funny enough, as you said French has a few front-rounded vowels [y], [2] and
[9], but also one back unrounded one: [A] (the "â" in "pâtes" /pAt/, as opposed
to the "a" in "patte" /pat/). 20 years ago, the difference between [a] and [A]
was already disappearing but was still alive (I learned it that way at least).
Nowadays it has nearly completely disappeared, only [a] stays (making "pâtes"
and "patte" homophones). Only the Northern dialects of French still keep the
distinction (but some - not all - have replaced [A] with [Q], which makes the
vowel system less strange :) ). this is like the nasals [E~] and [9~] which are
merging at the same time as [a] and [A], leaving only [E~]. Too bad: French is
losing some of the features that made its vowel system so original...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr