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

On Fri, 6 Apr 2001 18:42:14 -0000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
wrote:

>> 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?
Mm, no; 'pot', 'lot', 'rather' all have [Q], AFAIK. [A] is rare or non-
existent in English dialects (right?).

>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 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 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.
Before labials too? Analyzing my own speech, I get [t{b@] for {tabe}, but
[tVk] for {tak} (please, btw, consider me a native speaker of Danish, for
all practical purposes).

-----

On Fri, 6 Apr 2001 12:06:28 -0700, Frank George Valoczy <valoczy@...>
wrote:

>On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>
>> But that makes more sense - "Istanbul" has a dotless i, which is now
>> logical to me in light of its original "Constantinopolis" name. But
>> wouldn't it really be pronounced "Istambul", though? - [Mstambul] or
>> something like that (don't know where the stress falls).
>>
>
>Actually it has a dotted i, so it's pronounced [istambul]
>>
>
Right! :p I know what I was confusing: the city's name was on my mind with
the dotless-i/dotted-i thing, and now I know why - because I once noticed
it written with a capital i, with a dot, which I found interesting. I
misread my own mnemonic labelling of the city's name, reversing the truth.

----

On Fri, 6 Apr 2001 17:03:17 -0400, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

>Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>> And more about back-unrounded vowels, and their position in Westerners'
>> phonetic knowledge: English just happens to have two back-unrounded vowel
>> phonemes, /V/
>
>/V/, in my dialect, is *central*, not back.  I think that's how it is in
>most dialects.  Actually, my dialect makes no distinction between /V/
>and /@/, except that /@/ is much shorter.
Hmm, a central /V/ would be [3], which is already existent in English, in
words like {fur} [f3:]; so some dialects have already merged those two
sounds? What dialects are we talking about?

I want to add, as a friendly disclaimer, that I don't profess to know
exceptionally much about English phonetics, or at least not comparable to
what the native linguists here know. So feel free to stomp my opinions into
the ground here :)

>> and /Q/
>
>That's low-back unrounded, right?  I have that.
>
>> and speaks of back-unroundeds as if they were something very foreign.
>
>Non-low, they are.
All right; in the same sense, I guess, that close front-rounded [y] is kind
of foreign to us Icelanders, though we have close-mid [2] and open-mid [9],
from the same axis.

----

But what's this thing, anyway, with front-rounded vowels and back-
unroundeds being so exceptionally "rare"? I'm quite willing to accept that
statement, given statistical information, but from the data that I do have
(knowledge of the phonological composition of most Western IE languages,
many Altaic ones, some Chinese ones, and various other random languages), I
can't see how we can claim such vowels to be anything more than "uncommon"
(a term I'd more willingly apply myself).

I mean, all German languages, except for English, have front rounded
vowels; English has b-unr ones (whether you like it or not :p). In the
Romance family, two major languages have either type of vowels; French has
f-r, Romanian has b-unr (right?). The Altaic family proliferates with
vowels of both "marked" types. In some sample Chinese languages, Mandarin
seems to have both f-r and b-unr (overload?), Cantonese has plenty of f-r
(only), and I'd assert that various other Chinese languages have vowels of
either type too.

However, the majority of Romance languages admittedly don't have any of
those, and Arabic doesn't either (nor do the other Semitic langs??), and
God knows what there is to say of all those other languages out there (as
I'm missing immediate data on Eastern IE, Dravidian, Bantu & other African,
native American, etc etc). I'm certain others could add lots of typological
data to support either my view or the opposite. I'm just curious as to how
the high-markedness statement is justified.

Regards,
Óskar

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