Re: 5-vowel system like Spanish?


"Keith GOERINGER" <verbivore@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:verbivore-F99292.21185101022007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
John,

Let's try this again, and this time I hopefully won't launch the damn
message by hitting some unintended series of keys...

Same with Russian -- except without the length. I was going on the
discussion in Comrie's "Slavonic Languages", which claims that in Czech
and Russian (and Polish and Belorussian, but not Ukrainian) "i" and "y"
are allophones. I realise that not everyone agrees with this, and it
probably varies with dialect, in all these languages. (Polish wouldn't
make the list anyway because of its extra nasal vowel.)

If you're talking solely about tonic vowels, then you could get away
with claiming the five vowels -- despite the fact that there is such a
great phonetic difference between the /i/ and /y/ allophones (to include
a /w/ on-glide after labial consonants). But if you're talking about
overall phoneme inventory, you would have to include /@/ at least,
because of vowel reduction, so there you are with six. A couple
examples:
<kOlokol>

Any reason for the upper-case "O" in this transliteration?

['kOl@k@l] 'bell (N/A sing)'
<kolokolA> [k@l@ka'la] 'bells (N/A plu)'

<borodA> [b@ra'da] 'beard (N sing)'
<bOrodu> ['bor@du] 'beard (A sing)'

and this one, which has a nice number of vowel-letters:

<primykajuschegosja> [primy'kajuschiv@sj@] 'adjoining (G masc/neut
sing)'

(Ugly transcription with <sch>, but what can you do?)

As I understand it, once you know where the stress is located (stress being phonemic), then it's completely predicable which vowels will be "reduced", and whether they'll go all the way to shwa. So, /@/ isn't a separate phoneme -- it's just the allophone of /a/ and /o/, used in all syllables except those that're stressed and those immediately preceding a stressed syllable. Just as both /a/ and /o/ have the allophone [a] (or, perhaps more accurately, [V]) in immediate pre-stress syllables.

John.

.

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