--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@Y...> wrote:
> Sure they differ in quantity, I'm sorry I haven't been explicit
about this
> any more; their quality, however, is the same. 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|).
I often hear High German /I/ pronounced with a certain amount
of rounding. "Bitte" ends up halfways towards "büttö",
especially in "snobby" speech. I would expect this feature
to be missing from the realizations of /e/.
-- Christian Thalmann