Re: the sound [a]

Mark P. Line wrote:

>Nik Taylor said:
>
>
>>Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Assuming that having [i] and [u] in non-final position would be
>>>perceived as
>>>odd, wrong or accented, certainly.
>>>
>>>I notice that your hypothetical example language appears to use fairly
>>>long
>>>words or alot of coda consonants.
>>>
>>>
>>Eh, so make it 2:1, then.  Or even 1.5:1, the ratio isn't important.
>>:-)  I just meant, whichever is more common, or can be analyzed as the
>>default (that is, it's simpler to say "use [i] in case X, [e] otherwise"
>>than to say "use [e] in case X, Y, or Z, [i] otherwise", should be
>>considered the phoneme.
>>
>>
>
>So, when we're studying the basic color terms of a language, we believe
>that we can ascertain what a speaker's perceptual prototypes are.
>
>But in the case of phonemes, we can't...?
>
>Maybe we could just ask native speakers which sound they hear.
>
>
But they'd have to be phonetically trained natives.  Which, when
recording endangered and/or unknown languages, this is probably rare.

An oddity, it seems to me, is the transcribing of Spanish [D]~[d],
[B]~[b] and [G]~[g] as /d/, /b/, and /g/, respectively, despite the fact
that [D], [B], and [G] are used in more situations.

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