Re: laterals (was: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia)

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Isaac Penzev wrote:

> Javier BF eskribiw:
>
> > But the choices made are arbitrary [...]
> > Besides, Spanish mid e and mid o
> > sound distinctly different from French open and close e's
> and o's
> > Yet so far there's no
> > IPA symbol for those distinct vowels, featured in
> > the third most spoken language as well as in others
> > Another common vowel sound
> > for which there is no IPA symbol is the central a,
> > which is the kind of a vowel featured in languages such
> > as Spanish and Hindi. The IPA symbol [a] stands for
> > the lowest _front_ vowel and sounds too front for
> > my Spanish speaker ear, as if it had some amount of
> > e-quality
>
> All the said above is true concerning Russian vowels too.
> From this description I understood that they have 100%
> congruent mapping to Spanish ones!
From what I can tell from a search on the net, Spanish /a/, /i/ and /u/
sound almost equivalent to my /a/ (but), /I/ (bit) and /u/ (foot) (Sp.
/i/ was a little tenser... but did sound anything like a long e :). /o/
was between /O/ (hot) and the first part of my long O (boat), but I'm not
entirely sure what that is. /e/ sounded diphthongal [ei] in the only
recordings I could find that worked...

All I can find in Russian is some music by Zemfira (so this mightn't be
indicative of spoken R.); in general it just sounds like my English
re-arranged in funny ways with a few different consonants/diphthongs and
less vowels (missing any equiv. of /o:/ (board) and /8:/ (bird), there's
also something which I can't quite tell if it's [A] or [Aj], and /i/
seems to vary between the Sp. /i/ and my /I/, and always /I/ word finally
(significant because my dialect never has /I/ wf.)). Does Russian have a
length distinction?

I would describe front [a] as having some [&]-like quality (but I guess
that's my English speaking), though in general British dialects that use
[a] for 'bat' sound much closer to my /a/ than /&/. I too think a central
[a] would be useful, even if only for discussing phonetics, it seems to
crop up often enough.

As for French é and è, é is higher than mine, è is lower and sounds like
an American /E/. It would probably take some time getting used to
distinguishing them...

--
Tristan