Re: Questions and Impressions of Basque

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 03:43:15 -0700, Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
wrote:

>--- Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, to my ears, German and Swedish has
>> each two quite distinct 'i'
>> sounds, as does English. The vowels in the initial
>> syllables of _Ihre_ and
>> _Irre_ differ as much by quality as by quantity
>> ([i:] vs [I]; approximately the
>> same as English "feel" vs "fill"). If the Russian
>> vowel is closer to the vowel
>> of _Irre_, the connection doesn't really work at
>> all.
>
>I think I must have bad ears. To me, the difference
>between "Irre" and "Ihre" is that the first one is
>short and the secund one is long. I never bothered for
>any other difference and never had the slightest
>trouble (also, I learned German for 8 years at school
>and nobody ever told me that there might be different
>"i"s in German, except for length).
>
>Of course, with English, everything is different.
German has two clearly different pronunciations of "i" irregarding of its
length. The 'short i' (as in "irre, Mitte") is more similar to French "é",
but short, whereas the 'long i' (as in "ihre, Miete") is pretty much the
same as French "i". (Analogically, there are two different pronuntiations of
German "u" and "ü".)

It's typical of a French accent that the two "i" are pronounced the same
way. (Most German speaking people like the French accent.)

kry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust