Re: YAEPT alert! [Re: Not phonetic but ___???]

Hi!

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> writes:
> En réponse à Mark J. Reed :
>
> >Incidentally, to my non-native-French ear it seems that the closest French
> >vowel to [U] is the one in "oeuf".
>
> Really? "oeuf" is [9f], i.e. the vowel is the rounded version of
> [E].
> ...
The real distance does not seem to matter much when mapping perceived
sounds from other languages to native phonemes.

I once tried to find out which vowel phoneme Germans (especially me)
perceive intuitively when hearing e.g. English phones.  I also tried
others.  I found strange things:

   a) distance does not matter much
   b) maybe openness is more important than distance, but not always
   c) in general, there is no rule

Examples of my intuition of mappings to German vowels:

   [V] -> /a/     - strange(?), since German has /O/.
   [1] -> /y/     - hmm, not /u/, not /i/, but /y/.
   [3] -> /9/     - actually, even stressed [@] maps to /9/,
                    possibly because /@/ only occurs unstressed
   [M] -> /9/, maybe /@/
                  - that's far away, and rounding is different
   [7] -> /9/     - furthermore, this vowel sounds 'very
                    weird' (tm)

All more or less 'weird' vowels (for my German ear) seem to map to
German /9/.

Summarising: it seems strange how vowels map to native phonemes.
Physical features probably won't help much.

**Henrik

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