Re: [YAPT] Judge my vowels

Christian Thalmann wrote:

> In the light of recent discussion about Swiss German
> phonetics, I acquired some insecurities about my grasp
> of the IPA vowels, in particular of the front unrounded
> persuasion.  So I thought up this test:
>
> 1) I recorded a "vowel ladder" from the top to the
>    bottom: [i I e E & a A].  The file is online on

To me, that sounds like [i], [e] (almost sounds diphthongal to me,
actually), [e] (a touch higher), [E], [&], [a], [Q]. If we try to link
them to phonemes of my english, they'd be /I:/, /e:/ (but not quite),
/e:/ (again, not quite... slightly higher), /e:/ (slightly lower), /&:/,
/a:/, /O:/ (vowel found in only the word 'gone', except yours is
slightly shorter).

My ear probly isn't anything to go by, though :)

>    my homepage.  Could the experts among you
>    (professional linguists) please tell me where
>    my pronunciation doesn't match the true IPA
>    phone?
>
>    http://www.cinga.ch/reference/ladder.mp3
>
>    I also included the words "bataille", "Eigääl"
>    and "macchiato" to show that I use the same [a]
>    in those three languages (French, Swiss German,
>    Italian), including in the [aj] diphthong.
>
>    I noticed that I realize the /a/ of deliberate
>    High German at a more central place than [a] in
>    both the mono- and the diphthongs.  I presume
>    that standard Italian also uses that central
>    [a], so my example above was probably too
>    extreme.
>
> 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),
>    Bad [a ~ A] (High German), Baad [A] (Swiss
>    German).

Similar stuff applies here, except the vowel in 'beat' is half-long and
therefore clearly /i:/ (also the fact that no word 'beart' exists helps).

>
>    http://www.cinga.ch/reference/bXt.mp3
>
>    As you can see, the [E]s of German and English
>    are identical to me.  Züritüütsch [a] is
>    clearly below [&] and to the front of High
>    German "a".
>
>
> Feedback welcome.
>
>
>
> -- Christian Thalmann


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