Re: [YAPT] Judge my vowels

Drat. I went over my quota.

Christian Thalmann wrote:

> 1) I recorded a "vowel ladder" from the top to the
>     bottom: [i I e E & a A].  The file is online on
>     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
My expertise is fading, but....
Your [i I e] all sound a little higher than I'm accustomed to. In
particular, if your [I] and [e] are typical, I can see how one might confuse
them. Actually, the [I] and [A] sound to me as if they're slightly  rounded,
sort of [Y]-ish and [Q]-ish resp. (as Tristan also remarked of your [A]--
but that may be in the quality of the
recording/my speakers or who know what.  Oddly, when you give all these
vowels in words in bxt.mp3 they sound right on. (Except for your Germ.
"Beet", which still sounds a bit [I]-ish.  Is it possible that because Germ.
/e/ is always(?) long and [I] always short, there is room for some overlap?
or perhaps the norm for Germ. /e/ is just slightly higher than we US-ophones
are accustomed to?)

> 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).
>
>     http://www.cinga.ch/reference/bXt.mp3
>
>     As you can see, the [E]s of German and English
>     are identical to me.
Yes. It probably helps that both are short. (My feeling is that even in
lengthening environments, Engl. [E] is shorter than [ej]-- rain :: wren,
raid :: red.)

> Züritüütsch [a] is
>     clearly below [&] and to the front of High
>     German "a".
Yes, but it's apparently umlauted, so it ought to be fronted, no? For me,
the
length difference stands out more than the diff. in quality, but then, it's
not a vowel that occurs in my dialect.

Anyhow, recording the vowels (especially) of one's language, both in
isolation and in context, and making it available to the List, is _such_ an
excellent
idea--- we all ought to do it-- ought to have done it a long time ago.  I
will, as soon as I invest in a
microphone and figure out how to use it.

FWIW-- I learned phonetics, during a summer program at Michigan, from June
Shoup, who I believe was a student of Ladefoged's. I don't know who taught
him.... Ms. Shoup died untimely, back in the late 1960s or early 70s, and it
was considered a great loss to the field. She had written a textbook for
intro. phonetics, which we used in its preliminary xeroxed form.  It's been
packed away for several years and I haven't come across it yet.

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