Re: Ease of pronunciation

On 2/16/06, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> René wrote:
> <<
> Do any of you know whether there are vowels that are inherently
> easier to
> pronounce than others - for all people?
>  >>
>
> In theory, [@] (schwa) should be the easiest vowel to pronounce,
> because it's supposed to be the sound you make if you vibrate
> your vocal folds and your mouth is a completely neutral position.
> (In practice, it takes a little bit of work to pronounce a true schwa.)
> By this theory, I'm guessing that [E] should be easier to pronounce
> than [e], actually, because it's lax, and the tongue is closer to its
> rest position.
So would I.

[a] could also be a good candidate for "easy to pronounce" -- after
all, it's supposed to be a baby's first vowel sound (see [mama] etc.,
which crops up in lots of languages' baby talk for a parent, usually
the mother, combining "the easiest consonant" and "the easiest
vowel").

> But, then again, I'm sure 99% of it language specific.
On 2/16/06, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> No idea, but I suspect any such differences are swamped by language-specific
> neural wiring that makes the sounds of that language come "naturally".
Ditto.

For most English speakers, for example, I'd say that [E] is easy while
[e] is harder, since it's not a phoneme in English ("long a" is a
diphthong, for most speakers, not a pure [e] as in, say, French or
German).

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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