Re: OT: code-switching

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> Hm.  What about Swedish <a>?   How would you render that with precision?
It's pretty much cardinal [a], near as I can tell.

> I remain convinced that the Spanish /a/ is the same vowel I have
> in my personal (non-RP) pronunciation of "father"; based on the
> above site, it lies somewhere between [a] and [A]. and could be rendered
> [a-], but I'm not convinced it's closer to [a] than [A]; maybe it's
> [A+].
This doesn't surprise me. During a few years on this list, I've seen rather a
few hints that many Americans pronounce their /A/'s rather front of cardinal
[A]. Such variation is hardly surprising, since there's rather alot of
phonetic space between RP /A/ and /&/.

I do think that [a-] is the better rending. But there's no doubt variation
within Spanish too. (Again, the Spanish I hear is overwhelmingly European.)

> At any rate, that is the vowel I use when speaking Spanish[*],
> and I was once (lo these many years ago before I forgot so much)
> mistaken for a native speaker by a native speaker.
Well, that doesn't necessarily mean much. I've been taken for a native German
by native Germans a few times, despite using a retroflex trill for /r/ and
labializing back rounded vowels.

> [*] For that matter, also when speaking German, French, Klingon, Russian,
>     Esperanto, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Lojban, Latin,
>     Korean, Romanian, etc, etc, etc . . .
Do you actually _know_ all those languages? If so, wow!


                                           Andreas

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