Re: [YAPT] Judge my vowels

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 12:18:13AM +0200, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> > 2) I recorded a latter of similar words from
> >    different languages to demonstrate that I do
> >    distinguish all the vowels mentioned in 1).
> >    Explicitly, the words are: beat [i], bit [I],
> >    Beet [e] (High German), bed [E], Bett [E] (High
> >    German), bat [&], bätt [a] (Swiss German),
>
> Huh.  A word spelt |bätt| is pronounced [bat] in Swiss German?
> Is this a case of the orthography not catching up to a sound change,
> or just standard orthography applied to a non-standard dialect, or
> what?
>
This must be a peculiarity of Swiss German-- umlauted a does not > E, but
rather to low front [a] as evidenced on the Norwegian IPA site--if you
listen closely it sounds like Bostonian /a/ before /r/, the closest analogue
in US dialects (listen to old recordings of JFK or Bobby K. or early Ted K.
[present-day Ted seems to have toned down his accent]).  In any case CT's
vowel in bätt is quite distinct from that of High Germ. "Bad", which is what
I call [a].

This is one of my confusions/arguments with the various IPA sound samples on
the web, mainly wrt the various "a" sounds--  [a] on the UCLA site is
definitely not the same as [a] on the Norw. site.

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