From kesuari@yahoo.com.au Thu Aug 19 01:13:33 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:19:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from web52006.mail.yahoo.com ([206.190.39.62]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.34) id 1Bxi3A-000357-Pv for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:13:33 -0700 Message-ID: <20040819081302.7510.qmail@web52006.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [202.147.117.39] by web52006.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:13:02 EST Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:13:02 +1000 (EST) From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Tristan=20Mc=20Leay?= Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Anyone there? To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org In-Reply-To: <20040819072528.GC5127@chain.digitalkingdom.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-archive-position: 700 X-Approved-By: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: kesuari@yahoo.com.au Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners --- Robin Lee Powell wrote: > On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 04:19:42PM +1000, Tristan Mc > Leay wrote: > > --- Robin Lee Powell > wrote: > > > > > It's actually the lack of short 'i' that pisses > me off. :-) > > > > Why is it that [I] isn't an allophone of /i/? You didn't answer this qn. Is it just random? Perhaps you don't know? It's something that bugs me. >For > most people in the > > world, they're close enough that it's hard to > distinguish anyway... > > (I'm a native English speaker, and out of context, > I find hearing [i] > > vs [I] difficult; [I] is many times easier for me > to produce than [i] > > though.) > > /me blinks. > > You find the "i" in "bit" hard to distinguish from > the "ee" in "beet"? No, not at all. But the 'ee' in 'beet' is a diphthong IMD (starting from something like [@] and ending at somewhere like [i]). The 'i' in 'bit' is a short vowel. If I (or most people) are speaking a foreign language and not trying to eliminate an accent, /I/ is chosen for foreign /i/ in all positions including when it's illegal in English (assuming it doesn't distinguish b/n /i/ and /I/). When listening to other englishes, there's generally enough redunancy (e.g. extra length in 'ee') to tell. If even that fails, context normally does the trick. It wasn't until listening to Dutch that I noticed I couldn't readily tell, and subsequent events have since shown that I tend to consider short [i] as /I/. > That's just bizarre to me. What dialect? I'm pure > American English. General Australian English (i.e. not broad. Pretty far from broad, in fact). I sound nothing like Steve Irwin. So please eliminate all such notions in their grave. -- Tristan (happy to call himself tcristyn. except for the ugly orthography). Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com