Re: easy sounds

On 6 Jan 2005, at 1.24 pm, Elliott Lash wrote:

> --- Muke Tever <hotblack@...> wrote:
>
>> # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
>>> I've never heard about a language without the
>> sound [a](do you know if there are?) so it is
>> probably also easyto produce
>>
>> English doesn't have [a], though it does have [A]
>> and [{]. It doesn't seem to be easy for native
>> English
>> speakers to produce, as generally when they try to
>> produce
>> it (e.g. in pronouncing Spanish words) they come up
>> with,
>> surprise surprise, [A] or [{] (in America, usually
>> the
>> former).
>
>
> English has /a/, at least I think the words "on", and
> "father", and many others contain this sound.
English has no vowels sounds whatsoever, only dialects/accents of
English do. Keeping this in mind will help avoid creating pronunciation
threads. *Muke's* English has no [a], *your* English (might) have [a],
as short O or AH, *my* English has something I can't distinguish from
[a] (but I'm informed it's properly [6]), short as short U and long as
AR/AH.

As to Maxime's second question, about words like 'battle' and 'pack',
some dialects, particularly British and English-as-a-foreign-language
ones, use [a] in these words, but Americans and Australians generally
have [&], a higher, fronter vowel here (or one even higher and
fronter).

As for creating a language everyone can say---as long as you allow free
variation between [a] and [A] for the phoneme /a/, that's an okay
sound. In this particular case, I would recommend three vowels: /i/,
/u/ and /a/, with pronunciations ranging [i--e], [u--o], [&--A].

At any rate, all vowels are 'easy' to produce---it just depends on what
phonemes your native speech had that you learnt as a child. Babies (at
a particular stage of their linguistic development) can distinguish
more sounds than you or me.

--
Tristan.

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