Re: A bunch of phonological questions

Quoting Tristan Mc Leay <conlang@...>:

> On Sun, 2005-09-18 at 20:48 +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Quoting John Vertical <johnvertical@...>:
> >
> > > Hi all, here're some unrelated phonological & phonetical questions I've
> > > thought up lately. I'll be thankful for any answers...
> > >
> > > 1. Low vowels
> > > Do any natlangs contrast the three of /& a A/? Yes, a couple of conlangs
> do
> > > that, but I've never heard of any natlang examples?
> >
> > I do not know of any language that could be sensibly analyzed with those as
> > three separate phonemes, but many varieties of Swedish, incl the Standard,
> has
> > all of [& a A] phonetically. The long and short varieties of /a/ are [A:]
> and
> > [a], and /E/ gets lowered to [&] before retroflexes.
>
> How far forwards is the [a] here? How low is the [&]? (i.e. as [&] just
> being used to indicate a lowered [E], or does it actually mean
> [&]-proper?)
I'm no expert at phonetics, but I believe it's closer to canonical [&] than
canonical [E]. The [a] is pretty fronty.

BP could probably offer more phonetic precision.


                                                      Andreas