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

At 5:33 pm +0000 28/4/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
>
>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] -
Spot on!

>so [I] is what you get if you start at [i] and go a bit towards schwa.
Not necessarily - [I] can be tense if it pronounced strictly on the 'outer
edge' of the vocalic quadrilateral between cardinal vowels [e] and [E]; but
the German & English [I] is not merely between these two, but also, as you
say, more towards the central vowels.  it is retracted or 'lax' compared to
[i:].

>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,
Absolutely, if they are cardinal vowels as French and Italian /E/ and /e/ are.

> [E] as the lax version of [e] would indeed be a pretty weird
>idiosyncracy.
Yet it happens in German and English!  We have to distinguish between
narrow, i.e. phonemic transcription, and broad or (vaguely) phonemic
transcription.  The [E] of German & French is not the cardinal vowel; it is
more retracted and lax.  It is the lax or 'short' counterpart of German
[e:] or standard English [eI] (often still [e:] in many Brit dialects).

>Or is this idiosyncracy somehow common enough to be "normal"?
IMO no - to imply that it is normal is being anglocentric, as Christophe said.

>Or am I simply misunderstanding the lax~tense distinction?
No.

The trouble is that phonetic & phonemic transcritions are getting confused.
It would be more correct _phonemically_ to show the German pairs, e.g. as:
/i:/ ~ /i/
/e:/ ~ /e/

In English there is contoversy over whether we have:
/ij/ ~ /i/
/ej/ ~ /e/
_or_
/i/ ~ /I/
/e/ ~ /E/

But versions that give /eI/ ~ /E/ are, to my mind, perverse and confounding
phonemic transcription with phonetic notation [eI] ~ [E] in which, [E]
means "a sound close to, but slightly retracted from, cardinal vowel [E]".

Ray.

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