Re: tSat: Re: 'tEst 'pli:z ig'nOr\

T. A. McLeay wrote:
> On 02/02/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> wrote:
>
>>  > Hence that "Igor"/"Ivan" with a "long e" vowel is not
>>  > particularly much more apt than with a "long i" vowel.
>>  > Perhaps I should try saying what I mean, instead of
>>  > expecting people to jump to my conclusions :)
>>
>> Or at least point out clearly that the FLEECE vowel is [Ii]
>> for you! :-) But is the KIT vowel really [i] for you? No
>> wonder that Aussies and Kiwis find their accents *very*
>> different, since Kiwi KIT is [I\] or even [@]!
>
> [i] is the nearest vowel, but it's not as peripheral as, say, French.
> From the various cases of [i] and [I] I've heard in different
> languages (e.g. Icelandic, some German dialects or Kazakh), [i] sounds
> much more like KIT than [I] does on average. (Actually, in Kazakh, [i]
> is described as a "long i" and is phonemically /Ij/, but to my ear it
> is quite clearly a short [i]..)
Regarding Kazak, are you talking about the I in words like "bir" (one)
and "siz" (you) written with the same I-character as English, or the
other one, like in "siyr" (cow) and "it" (dog) written with the Russian
I (backwards N)?  To me, the one in "bir" seems like a centralized
version of [I], while the one in "it" seems to be an ordinary cardinal [i].

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