Re: Furrin phones in my own lect! (YAGPT warning!)

On 3/28/06, Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> Wikipedia writes /E/ for short e and suggests that [e] exists, at
> least, as an allophone of /e:/. Would you consider that an
> exaggeration?
I think that's possible. Short forms of the "normally long" vowels
occur, though I think mostly or only in pretonic syllables of loan
words.

For example, "Telefon" is (for me) ['te:l@fo:n] but "telefonisch" is
[tel@'fo:nIS]; the [e:] turned into [e]. I'd say they're the same
phoneme, though. (Again, though, the short allophone is, I think,
restricted to borrowings.)

> (In any case, it seems to me that if a language has both
> /e:/ and /E:/, and a short equivalent of both that's pronounced [E],
> the logical phonemic representation of it would be /E/. Is there any
> particular reason why you don't?)
I consider the short phoneme to be /E/ -- considering |Bett| [bEt] as
/bet/ seems a bit odd. Perhaps /e/ is simply for ease of writing? In
the end, as long as the assignment of symbols to phonemes is
unambiguous, it doesn't really matter which symbols you use.

And you may know this already, but /E:/ is a marginal phoneme for some
Germans, including me; it's nearly always realised as [e:], except in
very careful speech. |Räder| "wheels" and |Reeder| "owner of a
shipping company" coalesce as [Re:d6], and |Bären| "bears" and
|Beeren| "berries" as [be:R@n]. (OTOH, the singular |Bär| is [bE6] for
me rather than [be:6], for some reason. Just as I have [E6d@] where
the standard has, I believe, [e:6d@].)

> Does [6] ever mean anything else except for /(@)r/?
I don't think so.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Reply