Re: Russian vowel <bI>

> Actually, the whole question of "in what languages does this vowel
> appear" is senseless if understood phonetically. The vowel space doesn't
> have discrete places but instead is a non-discrete continuum. As people
> speak, they probably produce most vowels sooner or later no matter what
> language they are speaking in.

Well, strictly speaking you may be right, but there's presumably still
a sense of a probability distribution where some vowels will be very
unlikely to be produced by speakers of some languages. If we further
restrict ourselves to generally acceptable speech the probability that
some vowel sounds that don't "belong" to the language will be produced
will surely tend to zero, and there will be recognizable probability
peaks around the vowels that do "belong" to the language. So all I'm
asking for here is which languages have such a recognizable probability
peak centered on the same vowel (or greatly overlapping) as the vowel
ы in Russian. :-) I'd personally be surprised to hear the Russian
vowel in the middle of otherwise standard Hindi, for instance, although
I agree with you that the probability of such an occurrence may be
strictly non-zero.

The reason I asked about this vowel ы, by the way, is that I speak
English and some Indian languages, and am learning Russian. To my
English-attuned ears, this vowel sounds the most strange or exotic (a
purely subjective judgment), and I was curious as to whether, in the
larger scheme of things, this was really a strange or rare beast or
whether it was perhaps very common and I just happen to speak the few
rare languages that don't have this vowel. (Palatalization -- is that
the term? -- or the softening of some consonants is the other feature
of Russian that I found intriguingly different.)

Regards,

Satish

.

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