Re: some more Irish vowels

16 Dec 2006 07:29:31 -0800: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

No, Ruud. merry is [E]

Then why must Dutch speakers be taught not to use their /E/, which is
[E] or slightly higher, because for English <set> it is too low?

I have no idea why a Dutch writer, forty years ago, gave the following
instructions.

I have: to keep student from making unnecessary mistakes.

It may be perfectly sound contrastive analysis; it may be
based on misconceptions about English (or about Dutch, for that
matter); it may be aimed at teaching an understandable rather than a
perfect accent; who knows?

I know, because I read the book.

Please listen to http://wso.williams.edu/~jdowse/ipa.html (by Jonathan
Dowse, a student of Nathan Sanders, who regularly posts here), and
check if his [E] is appropriate for English words merry, set, bet,
read (past and particle) etc. etc. I think it's way to low. And [e] is
much too high. So the correct position is a little higher than [E],
which is also where Daniel Jones 1956 placed it.

Perhaps Nathan can tell us whether Jonathan is a Boston(-area) native,
which would throw _all_ his vowels way off of GenAm (and of NYC, too)..

Utter nonsense. Jonathan Dowse does NOT do a demonstration of English
vowels, but of IPA vowels. So his accent of English is immaterial,
assuming he did the job well.
You could have known if you had clicked the URL. You are again
discussing things you refuse to listen to and look at.

That JD can do demonstrations of IPA could only mean that he and all
the other makers of talking IPA charts, misunderstand IPA the same way
that I do: the symbols do not refer to actual speech sounds, but
depend on the language under consideration. Strange.

Perhaps Nathan can explain.

BTW, you do not happen to be one of those American speakers who use a
quite modern new variety of the sex vowel, which (if I hear it
correctly) is much _lower_ than the sax vowel, and possibly
centralised? Almost other people's sucks vowel (no pun intended)?
In that case all bets are off, because that one is really too much
different from all the usual variants in American English and
elsewhere.

Of course not. I'm a few years older than you.

So is Hilary Clinton, and I think she does that. (It's usually done by
women.)

2) When you say that Mary requires spreading, does it mean set and sat
(merry and marry) do not have spread lips? So they have neutral lips
(as rounded is just too unlikely).

Yes, Ruud. If something is not marked, it is unmarked.

OK.

3) Does this imply that English has a threefold distinction: some
vowels have rounded lips, some have spread lips, and some have neutral
lips?

No, it has no distinction at all.

Huh?

The spreading for Mary is utterly
unconscious and is merely a concomitant of the height difference --
perhaps it serves to provide additional salience to the phonemic height
distinction.

Which height distinction? The one you said you couldn't define, except
by calling it "the Mary vowel".

Height distinction of Mary vs. merry, and Mary vs. marry?

Totally puzzled now.

Wouldn't it be so much easier if instead of this mile long thread,
you'd simply tell us what, in your view and accent, are Mary, marry
and merry, in terms of vowel articulation? Relative to cardinal
vowels?

4) Is this distinction independent of the inherent difference in lip
opening shape that is connected to the height of vowels? Cf. "Back
over-rounded vowels in Assamese" at
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/index/sounds.html
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/appendix/languages/assamese/assamese.html

I don't know what Assamese would have to do with it, but when I
reported to you that Mary is accompanied by spreading, did you believe
I was lying?

No of course not. It's just that I have never ever heard of anything
like that before. But I'm always willing to learn.

And I wonder why you didn't say this earlier, instead of referring to
an undescribable "Mary vowel".

Item 3) Is completely new to me and seems very unlikely.

BTW. I object to your use of the word "is" when you says things like
"[E] is uncontroversially the vowel of merry." No two vowels are
alike. Even a cardinal [E] isn't the same for all speakers, because
its definition refers to relative tongue height, and every speaker's
speech organs are physically different, although great similarities
exist.

So you have been using the term "cardinal" in some idiosyncratic sense
that doesn't mean 'cardinal' at all?

So what does "cardinal" mean?
To me it means what Daniel Jones explains it to mean, in the
paragraphs I quoted fragments of. Articulatory phonetics, that is.

This one is interesting, BTW.
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/wells/wells.html
"Click on a sound to hear a recording of John Wells, Susan Ramsaran
and Peter Ladefoged (not always in that order)"

Look at the huge differences for high central rounded, for example.

--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
.

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