Re: Revised Eastern Vowel Orthography

At 14:55 23/05/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Danny Wier wrote:
>
>> FFlores wrote:
>>
>> >Also, /P/ and /f/ are not very distinct... more or less
>> >the same as with /h/ and /x/ (which someone once said that
>> >were found contrasting in any natlang).
>>
>> I can't think of a single natlang example of phonemic distinction of /P/
and
>> /f/.
>
>IIRC, the Maori language of New Zealand makes a phonemic
>distinction between the two.
>
>> The former isn't that common; it's found in languages like Japanese
>> and Uzbek, but the vast majority has the latter only.  They are a little
>> distinct, if the ear is trained well, so it's theoretically possible to
have
>> both...
>
>Well, it's not much worse than the acoustic distinction between /T/
>and /f/ for most people (non-English speakers, for example) who don't
>grow up having to make the distinction.   I believe there's a London
>dialect (Cockney?) that has leveled out all /T/s in favor of /f/:  "both"
>is [bof].
>
        French people that don't speak English well often pronounce the cluster
"thr" as "fr", making thus "three" and "free" homophones. We even have a
boys band called "2 be 3" that uses this ambiguity, making their name
either "to be three" ("=EAtre trois", because they are three friends) or "to
be free" ("=EAtre libre" because they choose what they want to do).

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html