Re: Improved (Short) Ygyde

Staving Christophe Grandsire:
>En réponse à Tristan :
>
>>  (Fortunately, I doubt anyone would
>>mix up 'reed' and 'rid', being two incredibly distinct words in use and
>>meaning.)
>
>Indeed :) . In this case, hearing them identically doesn't hinder
>communication. In fact, in my experience, confusing [i] and [I] never
>provokes misunderstandings when listening to English.
I'm not sure that this tense/lax distinction is phonemic in English - to be
honest, I don't quite understand what the distinction is, which makes me
suspect that it isn't an important one in my native language. However,
there's definitely a long/short contrast between reed [ri:d] and rid [rid],
which I think is a more important contrast in English. However, I'm
beginning to suspect that there's a tendency for length contrasts in
English to correlate with other contrasts, cf the contrast between [&] and
[a:].

Pete

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