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

--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.