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

En réponse à Philippe Caquant :


>They are terrible. Just like children. Once they
>started, they cannot stop any more. If you follow
>things to the end, you'll finally find out that they
>are no two different words in English including the
>same sound, and not two places in the world where the
>sounds of English are alike. I wonder how they can
>understand each other.
Probably by not really listening to each other ;))) .

>Just out of curiosity, I looked in my Harrap's about
>"goose" and "cook"; and so I discovered that in fact,
>it should not be the same sound. For goose, it's
>figured like gu:s (more or less),
Quite close indeed, X-SAMPA /gu:s/.

>  and for cook, it's
>cUk (be U i figure a kind of reversed omega).
Indeed. In X-SAMPA it's /kUk/.

>  Huh, is
>that so ? And what do such sounds sound like ?
Like they are supposed to sound like ;)) . Check out:
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

it has sound samples.

>  For me,
>a goose is a goose, and a cook is a cook.
And? ;))

>  Well, it
>seems that "goose" is like shoe, prove, threw,
>through, frugal and room; and "cook" is like put,
>wool, wood, would and full.
Indeed.

>Well, I'm sorry, but I really can't hear any
>difference.
Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Japanese people don't hear the 
difference between [l] and [r], but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 
It's just that the distinction between [u] and [U] is unknown to us French 
people, so we weren't trained to hear it, and it takes a very long training 
to learn to recognise new sound distinctions at adult age. But for English 
people, who have lived with this distinction since childhood, it's as 
obvious as we find the distinction between [i] and [e] obvious.

As for the difference, it's similar to the difference between the vowels in 
"eat" and "it" (I hope you do hear that difference). The first one (the [i] 
of "eat", or the [u] of "goose") is tenser, pronounced with more energy, 
and for all purposes identical to what we have in French ("i" and "ou"). 
The second (the [I] of "it" and the [U] of "cook") are lax, i.e. they are 
pronounced with less energy. As a result, they are a bit lower ([I] is 
between [i] and [e], and can sometimes be confused with French "é", while 
[U] is between [u] and [o]) and centralised (i.e. pronounced nearer to the 
center of the mouth than their tensed counterparts).

>  I often talked with English, American,
>Australian, New Zealand people for a while, when
>travelling abroad, and it never came to my mind that I
>ought to do a difference, and yet, everybody
>understood me when I said "goose" or "cook" (insofar
>we had to talk about geese and cooks).
That's because there's no [gUs] and no [kuk] in English, but as I showed 
with "eat" and "it", some words are only distinguished by those two sounds. 
You're just lucky that [u] and [U] have a low distinction ratio (I can't 
think personally of any words that are distinguished only by those two sounds).

>But that's all my own opinion, as a foreigner.
Well, if you ever want to learn the distinction, I need to warn you: I'm 
quite gifted at languages, and yet it took me ten years to master the 
distinction between [i] and [I], and 12 to simply hear the distinction 
between [u] and [U] (I'm not yet mastering the production of [U] quite yet 
though :((( . But I'm arriving there :) ).
________________________________________________________________________
En réponse à jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM :


>That is a question which is answered by the field known as "phonology".  :-)
Yep. Studying sounds *does* have purposes :) .


>It's very hard to hear differences that one's native language does not
>make.  My wife, for example, can't hear any difference between [flit] 'fleet'
>and [flyt] in a context where 'fleet' makes sense; OTOH, she can't hear
>any difference between [flut] 'flute' and [flyt] in a context where 'flute'
>makes sense either.  So for her, [flyt] can be a valid token of either 'fleet'
>or 'flute'.  For you, of course, the distinction between [flit], [flyt], and
>[flut] would be easy to hear.
I think Philippe doesn't know X-SAMPA. In French orthography, those would 
be respectively "flite", "flute" and "floute". Yeah that's right, English 
speakers most often can't separate "u" from "ou" or from "i". Hence the 
common English misprononciation of French "u" as "you" :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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