Re: YAEPT: STRUT (was: RFC: Renaming 3B to Tezenki)

On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 05:03:43PM +0200, John Vertical wrote:
> >On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 02:28:39AM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> >> Hi!
> >> > Eric Christopherson writes:
> >> > ... If so, would people whose first language is not
> >> > English perceive /kant/ and /kVnt/ to sound the same?
> >> > E.g. Germans, most definitely yes.  /V/ is a strange sound to us
> >> sounding very much like our /a/ so many of us pronounce those two
> >> words identically.
> >[...]
> >
> >FWIW, when I first learned English, I conflated [V] with [a], and [I]
> >with [i] when speaking English. I found [I] too much like [e] when
> >listening to English. It was only until I came to North America that I
> >learned to tell them apart.
>
> Also /U/ with /u/ presumably?
Yep. I learned "but" and "boot" as [bat] and [but], and "poor" as [pw@r]
or even [pu@r].


> This is actually how English is taught in Finland - eg. "bit a beet"
> as /bit @ bi:t/.
I had trouble distinguishing between "bit" and "beet", being from an L1
that doesn't distinguish vowel length (at least, not without including
other features). They both sounded like [bit]. It was only later that I
learned to tell between [I] and [i:].


> Apparently it does get the message across well enuff & introducing the
> concepts of /I U/ would be too much hassle. /V @ O/ are the only new
> vowels I remember being introduced to in English classes, the rest
> were more or less approximated with Finnish equivalents.
I still conflate [A] and [O].


[...]
> >But even now, I still have trouble distinguishing between [V] and
> >[6].
[...]
>
> I can't think of any language making use of THAT distinction, so it
> shouldn't be much of a bother.
[...]

It's more for my own sake, to pronounce different languages properly.


On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 12:43:57PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Isaac Penzev writes:
> > Henrik Theiling wrote:
> >
> > | Eric Christopherson writes:
> > | > ... If so, would people whose first language is not
> > | > English perceive /kant/ and /kVnt/ to sound the same?
> > |
> > | E.g. Germans, most definitely yes.  /V/ is a strange sound to us
> > | sounding very much like our /a/ so many of us pronounce those two
> > | words identically.
> >
> > The same is true for Russian and Ukrainian speakers. I still am not sure
> > about the precise quality of English /V/.
>
> I thought [V] was the reduced phone of the Russian /a/ and /o/
> phonemes?  So I thought <kholodylnik> was [xVlV'd15nik].
[...]

That's what I thought, too. I'm not too sure about the precise value of
[V], but a "lax [a]" is certainly what happens in Russian words such as
хорошо [xVrV"So:] and большое [bVl^j"So:j@], at least to my ears.


T

--
Don't drink and derive. Alcohol and algebra don't mix.

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