Re: [YAPT] Judge my vowels

J. 'Mach' Wust said:
> 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|).
Actually, I expect phoneticians to transcribe those vowels as [e] when
they hear an [e] and as [I] when they hear an [I]. I'd expect to hear both
in the particular examples you gave ("defekt" and "prekaer"), even from
the same speaker. I'd need statistical samples to see what might be
controlling the variation.

You may be confusing phonetic transcription with phonemic transcription
here. There is indeed room for debate as to which vowel phoneme these
vowels should be considered to be. But before you can debate that, you
need to know how speakers actually pronounce the forms.

> 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.

Has anybody published acoustic data that indicates that these vowels might
have the same quality?


>>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.
This is moot, because you've already corrected your claim that they're the
same sound.

Psychophysical intuitions about what these vowels feel like in terms of
quality or quantity are moot here anyway, because we're talking about how
the forms are actually articulated (namely, with an [I] and with an [e:]).

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.
It would take a lot to convince us that we're all mistaken.


-- Mark