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

PC> I found for ex a "half closed round vowel" against a
PC> "half open round vowel" (???). (I don't deny that a
PC> difference may exist, although I cannot guess it).

Those descriptions are common, but are an example of poor wording.  The
label "half-closed" does not mean "halfway closed"; it means "close to
the halfway point, but on the closed side".  Similarly, "half-open"
means "close to the halfway point, but on the open side".

There are 4 main tongue heights (or degrees of open-mouthedness)
recognized by the IPA: call them 1, 2, 3, and 4.  Assuming them to be
equidistant, it's clear that none of them represents the midpoint of the
range; that lies between 2 and 3.  If 1 is the lower/more open end of
the scale and 4 the higher/more closed end, then 2 is "half-open" and 3
is "half-closed".  But the standard terms for those are "open-mid" and
"close-mid", which, while somewhat nonintuitive, are better choices
because they don't sound like synonyms of the half-empty/half-full
variety.

The vowel [E] (which I believe is that in |tête| in the standard French
pronunciation) is an open-mid or "half-open" vowel; [e] ( the last vowel
in words such as |parlez|) is a close-mid or "half-closed" vowel.  The
same distinction holds for their rounded counterparts [2] (as in |deux|)
and [9] (as in |neuf|).  The primary difference between each pair is how
open your mouth is - moreso for [E] and [9] than for [e] and [2].

-Marcos