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

From:Levi Tooker <lrtooker@...>
Date:Sunday, April 18, 2004, 0:24
--On Sunday, April 18, 2004 1:57 AM +0200 Henrik Theiling
<theiling@...> wrote:

> 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
The English vowel usually represented by the 'wedge' symbol (X-SAMPA /V/) is really not as far back as the vowel represented by that symbol on the IPA chart. I find the German "short-a" /6/ phoneme sounds to me rather like the English "short-u" wedge vowel, although a bit more open than the English vowel. As for the others, I have no idea why they map to those phonemes, although it might have something to do with whatever in our brains associates the vowel property +back with the property +rounded, and produces many more back rounded vowels than front rounded or back unrounded vowels.