Re: E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

Raymond Brown wrote:
> >> Well, /e/ is tense and thus requires more articulation than the lax
> >> /E/.  Languages who have both sounds will usually place /e/ in the
> >> stressed or long syllables, while it slackens into /E/ in less
> >> important places.
> >
> >I don't quite understand what you both mean under the terms "tense" and
> >"lax" (they seem rather Eurocentric),
>
>Hardly - the tense~lax opposition occurs in the vowel harmony system of
>Igbo, Efik and quite a few other _African_ languages!
>
>Contrasts such as this are viewed as particulary important in distinctive
>feature theories of phonology; and these theories aim at _universally_
>valid distinctions.
>
>But I do agree that "Languages who have both sounds will usually place /e/
>in the stressed or long syllables, while it slackens into /E/ in less
>important places."
>...is a sweeping generalization which IMO probably doesn't hold up.
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 1:59 pm +0200 26/4/02, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>[snip]
> >
> >I'd even say "Anglocentric". The only time I ever saw them used in French
>was
> >to describe English phonology :)) .
>
>It's also applicable to German and Classical Latin, inter alia.  At least,
>in the case of C.L. we cannot, of course, be 100% sure, but it makes sense
>of developments in Vulgar Latin & Proto-Romance if Latin short vowel were
>more retracted than the tenser long vowels.
>
>But I agree that the generalization quoted above is indeed 'anglocentric'.
>Italian is a living example which shows quite the opposite.  The lower
>vowels /E/ and /O/ may occur _only_ in stressed syllables, while /e/ and
>/o/ occur both in stressed and in 'less important places'.
>
> >.............As I explained, I don't find anything
> >specially lax to [I], nor anything specially tensed to [i]. And I find
>the
> >latter much easier to produce than the former.
>
>Probably because French has [i], but not [I]  :))
>
> >But as you know, difficulty in
> >language is always relative.
>
>Quite so.
>
>The French pronounce all vowels, except [@], clearly and with equal vigor
>and degree tension.
>
>In English, [i:] (even tho many varieties of English tend to slightly
>diphthongnize it as [ij]) is close to the IPA cardinal [i].  But [I] is not
>merely lower in the mouth, but also less fronted.  The tongue is more
>retracted towards the centered, i.e. the muscles of the tongue are less
>tensed than they are when we say [i:].
>
>Some phoneticians, I believer, prefer the term 'retracted' rather than
>'lax'; but I forget how they term 'tense(d)'.
Is something fishy going on here, or is there actually a point in taking
linguistic classes?

Ok, that was joke, but despite my not taking linguistic lessons there seems
to be something strange going on here. I am of the impression that that
'lax' vowels differ from their 'tense' versions by being closer to [@]/[8] -
so [I] is what you get if you start at [i] and go a bit towards schwa. But
if this is true, both [e] are [E] tense, because they're both cardinals
right out at the edge of the vowel space, and considering, for phonemical
purposes, [E] as the lax version of [e] would indeed be a pretty weird
idiosyncracy. Or is this idiosyncracy somehow common enough to be "normal"?
Or am I simply misunderstanding the lax~tense distinction?

                                                       Andreas

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