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

Andreas Johansson wrote:

>Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
>>German [2] merges with [Y], being rather [2_r] than plain [2].
[snip]

>do you mean that German has merged /Y/ and /2/? As in, _möchte_ and
>_Früchte_ rhymes? That would certainly not conform to my experience, nor
>has a such phenomenon been mentioned in any of the phonological texts on
>German I've read.
_möchte_ has /9/ and is clearly distinct from /Y/. Between /2/ and /Y/,
however, there's no significant difference of quality. Compare _rüsten_
[rYstn] 'to set up' and _rösten_ [r2_r:stn] 'to roast': the distinction is
in the quantity.

There's much recent writings on that distinction saying that there's
something more than length which distinguishes the two: the opposition of
lax and tense vowels or of smoothly cut and abruptly cut syllables, but by
no means I'm able to explain these other oppositions even though I've read
quite a lot about them (could anybody help me?). I always suspect that the
main reason for these is to preserve the nice phonemic system of paired
vowels: long and short 'y'; long and short '2', etc. instead of the
following less symmetrical arrangement: long [y:]; long and short [Y] (or
[2_r]); short [9] etc.

Take as example the following:
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~hoole/pdf/freiburg_almostfinal.pdf

Regarding SAMPA (or CXS or X-SAMPA): I always confuse the digits used for
the representation of sounds, mainly '2' and '9' which I use most. Has
anybody already suggested the use of e\ and E\?

g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

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