Re: Cardinal vowels


mb wrote:
Ruud Harmsen wrote:

People on the Paris-based mainly Portuguese-language station Rádio
Alfa do this all the time, in dazzling speed: traffic news is read in
Portuguese, with all the French names in perfect French pronunciation
(no imitation, they are all fully bilingual), and sometimes music
programs are in French, with the Portuguese artist names in perfect
Portuguese. These people really have two complete and distinct phoneme
inventories, one for each language, but fully switchable back and
forth at the word level, seemingly effortless.

Just to avoid misunderstanding: It would be extremely confusing to
describe as "phoneme inventories" the fact of maintaining the *full
native phonology* including mouth position (and all other things that
do not determine recognition of a sound as belonging to a given
phoneme). What makes a phoneme is the range within which a sound is
recognized as belonging to a given phoneme even if uttered by a totally
foreign mouth, even with no intention of approximating the genuine
article.

Of course, the back-and-forth between the aboriginal sounds of two
languages while pretending to speak one is an irritating habit, which
seems limited mainly to radio stations (same thing here in the US with
some hispanic speakers on radio stations).

That's _exactly_ what I am talkig about. "Code-switching."

.

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