Re: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 08:25:15 -0000, Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote:

>Just something I noticed on a quick peek into the
>pronunciation section:  Your two rants at the bottom of
>the chart are both wrong.  Standard German short ä is /E/
>and indistinguishable from short e in pronunciation,
>while long ä is realized as either /E:/ or (more commonly
>nowadays) /e:/.
I disagree, it clearly IS distinguishable. An English speaker generally
hears no difference between these two sounds, but that doesn't mean that
there isn't one.
A good example here is the German word "Ärger" (engl. "anger"). Ith is given
as /ErgEr/ in the dictionary, which is clearly wrong as there is a notable
difference between the 'ä' and the 'e'. The word is neither "Ärgär" nor
"Erger", but "Ärger".

Another example: Sanskrit (and some other languages in that area) has to
different versions of k, g, c, j, t.,d., t, d, p, b. The first is like our
consonants, but with minimal breath, the second is with additional breath
released simultaneously.
A European speaker will generally hear no differerence between these two,
but that still doesn't mean that there is no difference!

>It does not sound like /{/; in fact, it
>is a classic feature of German accent in English to
>pronounce [E] instead of [{], so e.g. "have" ends up as
>"heff".
I did not say that it sounds like /{/, but that it is closer to /{/ than to
a normal 'e'.

>As for the different rhotics, each of them has its own
>IPA symbol.  [r] is the alveolar trill (Spanish rr), [4]
>the alveolar tap (Spanish r), [R] the uvular trill (Edith
>Piaf), [R\] the voiced uvular fricative (German r), etc.
>Rhotics are often written /r/ in phonemic (not phonetic)
>notation, though, so maybe your confusion comes from there.
>Check out the following page for a summary of IPA symbols
>for rhotics:
>
>http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Lehre/Skripten/TRANS1/TRANS1Rhotics.html
I see... well, I have several dictionaries here (German-English, -Italian,
-French, -Spanish), and the "r" is always written [r] in the phonetic
transcription in the square brackets, regardless if the word is from German,
English, French etc. I do know that the "r" is different, hence my confusion
about the usage of the same [r] for all of them. Seems only the dictionary
makers were too lazy to put in the proper "r" sound...

>And in case you're not familiar with the ASCII version of
>IPA we're using on this list, it's X-SAMPA:
>
>http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/thorinn/xsamchart.gif
Ok, I'll take a look.

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