Vowels
Saul Epstein 
Thu, 19 Mar 1998 15:23:25 -0600

At the risk of generating confusion with regard to the recent
discussion of how best to represent 12 vowels with 5 letters -- and
the side discussion of just how those 12 vowels sound, anyway -- I'm
going to try and recount a discussion Rob, Marketa, and I have been
having, which began as an attempt to get Rob's word generator up and
running.

Some of the things he and I had been saying about certain sounds gave
Marketa the impression that we had very different sounds in mind than
she did. I thought perhaps she was misunderstanding some of what we
were saying, but agreed that the only way to know for sure either way
was for us actually to be able to hear each other speak the sounds.

So we arranged a telephone call, which Rob tape-recorded. We planned
originally to try to use the recording to base some sample sound-files
on, but since I wasn't able to participate in the phone conversation
the recording turned out to be my way to hear Marketa.

Rather than deal with isolated phonemes, Marketa pronounced whole
words from our current word-list. I decided to treat the recording as
if it were data from a Vulcan speaker, and started a kind of phonemic
analysis, paying attention mainly to the vowels. In doing so, I let
myself be guided by Marketa's own position that the "short" vowels
described in the ZC aren't distinct from the "long" ones.

I'm not finished with breaking everything down, but when I am I'll
post it here. This is what seems to have emerged so far. We seem to be
dealing with 5 vowel phonemes, each of which has two major allophones.
Here is an imprecise description of them.


     /i/ (usually [i] as in "beat," sometimes [I] as in "bit")

     /e/ (usually [e] almost as in "bait," but not a diphthong,
          sometimes [E] as in "bet")

     /a/ (sometimes [a] as in Br. "Bart", Am. "botch,"
          sometimes [^] as in Br. "but" -- i,e. between [a]
          and schwa [*])

     /o/ (not sure how to describe with examples <g>)

     /u/ (always [u] as in "boot," so far)


If this turns out to be anything like "correct" or commonly
acceptable, it dissolves entirely the problem of what to do about the
"colon" or "double" vowels.

--
from Saul Epstein
locus*planetkc,com
www,jccc,net/~sepstein
"Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi
    suraketca'."
                                        -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at