E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))
| From: | Y.Penzev <isaacp@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, April 26, 2002, 10:52 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 10:38 PM
> > 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].
>
> 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), but as I mentioned before, in
Ukrainian the situation is vice versa: you get [E] in stressed syllables,
and [e] in unsterssed.
> And then, of course, there's English. It has /E/ as a phoneme, but
> /e/ only in the diphthong /eI/.
Which is pronounced [EI] or even [Ey] in some dialects...
> -- Christian Thalmann
Cheers,
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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