Re: Marked and Unmarked

On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> As for unrounded *non-low* back vowels ([A] is pretty common), English has
> them, and I hear that they also occur in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean
> (?), which suggests that they may be a Sprachbund of East Asia.  At any
> rate, in my experience they're even more rare than rounded front vowels.
<going cross-eyed visualizing a vowel chart)  If that includes
Kirschenbaum [u-], then yes, Korean has it.  The "basic" vowel system (as
in the non-compound vowels in Korean *orthography*) goes something like:

Nonback:
[i]  [y] (nowadays more commonly [wi]
[e]  "ö" (as in German schön, can't remember the IPA), nowadays [we]
[E]

Back:
[u-] [u]
[@]  [o]
[a]

[u-] being, if I recall correctly, "barred i" in the IPA...

And if the vowel system looks ugly, don't blame me, I didn't invent the
thing.  :-p  I sort of like [u-] better than [u], myself.  But the
rounded front vowels are disappearing pretty quickly, at least in Seoul
dialect, if I recall correctly.

Er...BTW...what's a Sprachbund?  Sort of a linguistic isocline?

YHL

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