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

Thanx, Raymond!

----- Original Message -----
From: Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2002 4:27 PM

> At 1:45 pm +0300 26/4/02, Y.Penzev wrote:
> >> > But the problem is that nobody uses it that way, so there must be a
> >reason. In
> >> > my opinion, [e] is more "simple" than [E].
>
> Eh?  They're both simple sounds.
Damn the mistranslations!
1. It was not me!
2. In some langs "simple" may mean "easy"...

> >> 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!
Yeah, plus Dinka etc. Now I remember! And since smbody expalined that "lax"
means "closer to schwa", now I see the point!
So I say that Ukrainian [e] is pronounced, so-to-say, more "schwa-coloured".

> 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'.
Maybe that's why some people say that Ukrainian resembles Italian in its
pronounciation.

Cheers,
Yitzik
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