quest for info/suggestions. re: dialects

[Andrea Vine]

Mike Salovesh wrote:
>
> Our informant kept telling us that we were failing to transcribe the
> differences between two vowels in the low back region.  I don't know
> about the rest of the class, but I sure couldn't hear any consistent
> difference between the "two" low-back vowels.  (That shouldn't have been
> a surprise. English uses lots of distinctions among front vowels, many
> fewer among back vowels.  We also tend to differentiate higher vowels
> much more than lower ones.  That predisposes us to miss vocalic
> distinctions in the lower back region.)
>
> I still don't hear two different vowels back there.  That means I don't
> do much of a good job in producing "them".  That is, if there actually
> are two distinct low back vowels in Hungarian.
>

My college linguistics professor (Dr. Samuel Martin, I think his name was) told
us that the sounds of Hungarian are close to those of American English.  So much
so that he overheard a conversation at a party with multilingual guests, and
since it sounded like English, he kept trying to parse it.  After some time
without success he edged closer to the conversation and discovered it was in
Hungarian.

When I was in Hungary, I found I had a similar experience.  What was
particularly frustrating about Hungarian, though, was the lack of recognizable
morphemes.  Even though the text is in the Latin script, I couldn't remember the
name of anything because I couldn't link the words to anything I knew.

Andrea