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

> Date:         Fri, 6 Apr 2001 23:53:24 -0400
> From: 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).
For high(ish) b-unr that's true for Danes as well (or at least for me,
as I wrote before), whereas they (I) tend to hear [V] as a skewed /a/
because of the allophonicity I described here:

> On Fri, 6 Apr 2001 18:42:14 -0000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
> wrote:
> >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).
<tabe> is [t{:be]; <tap> is [tVb]. Labial stops don't seem to affect
preceding /a:/, and I think velar stops have shortened it before the
backing happened. At least I cannot think of a word with /-a:g-/.

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

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