Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 03:57:13PM -0400, Trebor Jung wrote:
> OTOH, the vowel terminology, IMHO, excluding '(un)rounded', is a bit
> hard to understand.
It's not that the terminology is hard to understand; the terminology is
simple.  It's a question of relating it to one's actual speech without
taking x-rays of your mouth while talking. :)

Aside from rounded vs. unrounded, the vowel quality is determined by the
position of the top of the tongue (whatever part of the tongue is
uppermost) within the mouth when the vowel is spoken, measured in two
dimensions: from front to back and bottom to top.

Three positions are identified on the front-to-back axis: front,
central, and back.   Four positions are identified on the bottom-to-top
axis: open, open-mid, close-mid, and close.  The names refer to the
degree to which the mouth is open, but the correspondence is obvious:
other things being equal, opennng your mouth makes your tongue go down.
Many people prefer "high" and "low" to "close" and "open", but "close"
and "open" are what the IPA charts have.

So [i] is a front, close (or high), unrounded vowel.  Which means that
the top of the tongue is as close to the teeth and roof of the mouth as
possible while still having a place where sound can resonate, and the
lips open so it can escape (but not rounded).  At the other extreme is
[Q], a back, open, rounded vowel.

The more open the mouth is, the less variation there is front-to-back,
so there are basically no central open vowels; that is, nothing between
[a] and [A] that is worth distinguishing as a separate phone.  Most
languages' actual "a-sound" is somewhere between [a] and [A], and
there are diacritics for "further front" and "further back" that can be
used when precision is called for.  But in general, even for phonetic
transcription, whichever of [a] and [A] is nearer to the actual sound
will be used.

-Marcos