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

> Date:         Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:30:13 -0400
> From: Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>
> 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?
SAMPA [Q] is open back rounded --- don't you mean [A] there?

Anyway, I know how <hus> sounds in Swedish, and I can make something
very like that by unrounding an [u]. I can feel the difference between
producing [M] and [y], or between [7] and [2], but I still can't
really *hear* it. Swedish <hus> and ?<hys> sound almost alike to me.

I don't have the same problem keeping [V] apart from [O] or [9] when
hearing it, but then Danish has [V] as an allophone of /a/ (!) before
labial or velar stops.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)