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

Regarding the Turkish back-unrounded sound, written as {dotless-i}, I'm
finding its existence rather odd; I thought languages with front rounded
vowels (which Turkish has - {ö} and {ü}) wouldn't generally have back
unrounded too. I've generally held the belief that, typologically speaking,
the front-rounded and back-unrounded axes are mutually exclusive; perhaps
I've misunderstood something there...

As described, the Turkish vowel system, on the surface, has four closed
vowels: [i], [y], [M], [u] (it has [u], right?). That seems rather
overloaded to me; is it really correct?

---

And more about back-unrounded vowels, and their position in Westerners'
phonetic knowledge: English just happens to have two back-unrounded vowel
phonemes, /V/ and /Q/, but somehow English language literature doesn't seem
to admit to that very often, and speaks of back-unroundeds as if they were
something very foreign. What's with that? The Latin alphabet clouding
thoughts?


Regards,
Óskar

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