Re: [YAPT] Judge my vowels

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:24:08 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...> wrote:

>J. 'Mach' Wust said:
>> The second sound file, however, reinforces my view that in
>> German, the vowels of |bitte bete| have the same sound, though it would
>> be [e].
>
>In the standard language of Germany, the first vowels of |bitte| and
>|bete| are not the same phoneme, and they differ both in quality and
>quantity. In broad transcription, |bitte| has [I] while |bete| has [e:].
>If these words had the same sound, they'd be a minimal pair.
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|).

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

>You could
>question any number of native speakers of this language as to whether or
>not they think they're pronounced the same.
That's irrelevant. It's the orthography that makes them 'feel' a different
quality.

>Note that the national standard varieties of Austria, Switzerland and
>Luxembourg differ in many ways from that of Germany. This may be one of
>the sources of confusion here.
I know well that there are many varieties of standard German and that they
don't necessarily coincide with national borders. I'm speaking of the less
regionally coloured variety of German standard German which you'll find most
likely in educated speakers of northern Germany.

g_ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

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