[lojban-beginners] Re: Anyone there?

[Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@yahoo.com.au>]

 --- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
wrote: 
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 04:19:42PM +1000, Tristan Mc
> Leay wrote:
> >  --- Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> 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).

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