[YAPT] Judge my vowels

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
    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).

    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

Replies