Re: Allophone Problem

Quoting "T. A. McLeay" <conlang@...>:

> Henrik Theiling wrote:
> ...
> >> Well, that's exactly the thing, though.  They ran experiments
> >> with people just like you who never doubted that the words
> >> were identical, and they consistently were able to spot which
> >> one ended in a voiced consonant and which one a voiceless
> >> (they tested the results statistically, and all that).
> >
> > Interesting.  It is a bit puzzling, though.  How can the speech center
> > produce different phones when for the rest of the brain, they are
> > identical?  I could imagine the reverse case, when the human is sure
> > there is a difference when there really is none in the audio data, but
> > the other way around contradicts my intuition.
> >
> > I think I will have a read some papers then.
>
> I gather that in some dialects of Swedish, there are two kinds of /e/
> which never merged, but merged in the standard varieties, so the
> orthography doesn’t distinguish them. Phonetically I think they’re
> fairly distinct (not like these near merges that miss), and the
> distinction is quite consistent, but native speakers consider them to be
> the same.
>
> Perhaps one of our Swedish listmembers can provide more detail on that,
> at least..?
I assume you're talking about /e/ and /E/, the short froms of which have merged
as [E] in the standard 'lects. They're more-or-less consistently kept apart in
writing as <e> vs. <ä>. Some dialects keep them distinct also in pronunciation,
but apparently some speakers of such dialects nonetheless claim to merge them.

You also get the opposite; people who claim to pronounce them differently yet
can't tell their own recored pronunciations of pairs like _sett_~_sätt_ apart.


* The long versions merge as [e:] in some 'lects, but this is considered
nonstandard.

                                 Andreas

(I'm having trouble posting this. Sorry for any multiple posts.)

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