Re: some more Irish vowels

16 Dec 2006 10:44:05 -0800: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:


Ruud Harmsen wrote:
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.
What are they? Are necessary mistakes permitted?

Mistakes that constitute a Dutch accent when speaking English.
Do you know the song "Little Green Bag" by teh "George Baker
Selection"? That kind of English. It's so bad even I have trouble
understanding it. Nevertheless, it was a number hit in the States,
back it 1968 or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Baker_%28Dutch_singer_and_songwriter%29

Perhaps your Mr. Trenite was misinformed,

Possibly. As an aside, he did have excellent knowledge of how spelling
relates to pronunciation, having written the poem "The Chaos":
http://members.fortunecity.com/rapidrytr/Spell/chaos.html

or perhaps the state of affairs he was
describing FORTY YEARS AGO was not what it is today.

Quite likely. But the difference between a reasonably passable British
accent and the same 70 years ago (mine was probably a later edition of
an older book) is much smaller than between a bad Dutch accent and
proper English. So most of what he writes is still quite valid today.

He died in 1946, by the way:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Nolst_Trenit%C3%A9
(no English available). It mentions:
"Drop your foreign accent. Vocal gymnastics. Haarlem, Tjeenk Willink,
1909."
So that's how old the original version is. Nice illustration of how
slowly langauges change.

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.

You know from reading the book that everything he asserts is
accurate???

I know whether be aimed at teaching an understandable rather than a
perfect accent, which is what you asked. He aimed at an accent much
better than necessary just for being understood.

You know from reading the book that everything he asserts is
accurate???

I don't understand what that could have to do with it.

Please listen to http://wso.williams.edu/~jdowse/ipa.html (by Jonathan
Dowse, a student of Nathan Sanders, [...]

Okay, smartass, I clicked on your useless link.

You're not insulting _me_ by calling it useless, but somebody else,
who doesn't deserve it.

It took a VERY long time for the page to appear

About 0.25 seconds for me. There must be something amiss with yout
hardware. Mine is six years old, so ....

(maybe you've overloaded their system), and
when I clicked on the buttons, absolutely nothing happened. The title
bar at the bottom says the sounds are in a format called "siff."

No, aiff, that's a standard in Unix circles. My rather obsolete
Windows Millenium Media Player has no problems with it though.

I have
never heard of that, and obviously neither had the Hewlett-Packard
people two or so years ago (whenever this computer was built) or the
Windows XP people.

Hardware builders don't include sound file formats, that's software.

I just tested the page on a three old Acer with XP: works like a
charm.

Do you not know what "distinctive feature" means? Only one (acoustic or
artuculatory) feature is distinctive of any particular segment; any
others that happen to accompany it are redundant.

Yes, you mentioned that before. I don't find a wise decision, but it's
how it is.

Do I also need to
refer you to Jakobson and Halle 1956 and to Jakobson, Fant, and Halle
1951?

No, you did earlier.

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

Totally puzzled now.

Once more: Mary is intermediate in height between merry and marry.

You could have said that 200 posts ago.

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?

I have no idea what the Cardinal Vowels are supposed to be.

Huh? Totally puzzled yet again.

I have given you the articulation. I can also give you the
phonemicization: /eh/ /&/ /e/ in the order you listed them in.

Ah, so Mary has the make vowel? Then why didn't say so? Why did you
even deny it when somebody else said so?

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".

Because I did not know that people do not know what American English
sounds like.

I do know what American English sounds like, I can even understand it,
I too suspected that Mary would be (or start) intermediately between
marry and merry, yet I had never heard of Mary having additional lip
spreading. Nor can I recognize the effect of addtional lip spreading
Does this combination of skills amaze you? If so, that amazes me.

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.

No. To Jones, it meant the extreme positions of the articulatory
organs.

How's that different from what I said? By no you mean yes?

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.

Differences between the three speakers? I don't know who Ramsaran is,
but the other two had it directly from Jones.

Yet they sound very different in some vowels. Just listen (Wav format
this time, so should work even on your computer.)
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
.