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Re: easy sounds

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Thursday, January 6, 2005, 19:07
On Thursday, January 6, 2005, at 02:56 , Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 6 Jan 2005, at 1.24 pm, Elliott Lash wrote: > >> --- Muke Tever <hotblack@...> wrote:
[snip]
>>> 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.
[snip]
> 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,
True as far English-as-a-foreign-language - but as a Brit born & bred, the former statement is a bit misleading. The southern English pronunciation is CXS [&]; this is also used in some Scots Lowland & other dialects. [a] is used in these words in Welsh English, the Scottish highlands and many (all?) northern English dialects.
> but Americans and Australians generally > have [&], a higher, fronter vowel here (or one even higher and > fronter).
Yep the Brit RP is [&] - the Australian certainly tends to sound more like [E] to us Brits. And Merkans quite often have something more like [I@] now. [snip]
> 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.
Yep. =============================================== On Thursday, January 6, 2005, at 03:13 , # 1 wrote:
>> 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. > > Are you sure? any french speaker can know if someone who speaks french > have > english as natal language with the pronounciation of the vowel [y]
Isn't this what Tristan was saying? "it just depends on what phonemes your native speech had that you learnt as a child" A baby has a 'blank sheet' - all vowels are 'easy'. What later we find easy or difficult depends upon what we learnt as children.
> Except if the person lived in a french envirronment since a long time, an > english natal speaker will say the sound [y] like [Y] or [}]
Eh? This is, with respect, a gross generalization. It runs counter to my experience. Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com =============================================== Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]