Re: A bunch of phonological questions

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?)

--
Tristan.

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