Re: [YAPT] Judge my vowels

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 15:25:42 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...> wrote:

>J. 'Mach' Wust said:
>> Short [e] is identical to [I]. The only reason why we transcribe the
>> first vowel of |defekt, prekär| with [e] and not with [I] is the
>> orthography (there are no comparable words with |i|).
[snip]

>> This is confirmed in the recent papers that have examined this question.
>> As an example, you may have a look at the following:
>>
>> http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~hoole/pdf/freiburg_almostfinal.pdf
>
>I don't see where they show that "bitte" doesn't have an [I] or "bete"
>doesn't have an [e:], nor do I see how they could do so just from the
>limited types of articulatory data they're considering.
You're right, they don't mix them up. They just don't know what the
difference is. They've found that the vowel represented with [I] is lower
(in terms of tongue position) than the vowel represented with [e(:)],
inverting thus the usual 'vowel ladder', see p. 133. Also, they're saying
that they're planning experiments to test whether the difference between [I]
and [e] is perceptually relevant in German, at least that's how I read p. 140.

>In any event, I do not expect trained phoneticians to be fooled by
>orthography. Trained phoneticians hear an [I] in "bitte" and an [e:] in
>"bete" (still broad, but narrow enough for this distinction even with the
>crowded high front sector) for speakers of the German national standard.
I wonder whether phoneticians that don't know German would hear the same.
They'd normally learn that the tongue position in [I] is higher than in [e].

I admit that my claim that the quality of the first vowels in |bitte| and in
|bete| were identical has been overhasty. It's likely that there may be a
difference (though smaller than, say, between English [E_r] and
German/French [E]). I still believe that the habit of transcribing them with
[I] and [e:] is after all tradition, that is, influence by the orthography.

g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

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