schwa-raising - formants

[Rankin, Robert L]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------

> Bob Rankin and Cecil Ward have both said basically the same thing: they
hear these vowels as /I/, and so they are /I/. I take this point, but I
don't think it stands up to scrutiny on a wider basis.

That depends on whether "wider basis" is intelligible in this context or
not.  I'm certainly far from certain what it might mean.

> It's clear that for both Bob and Cecil, the raised schwa counts as /I/,
i.e. perceptually they identify the vowel with /I/.

I believe that's about all either of us has really claimed.  If it sounds
like an English /I/ to us, then to us it's an English /I/.  What it might be
to someone from NYC or Glasgow is immaterial to our particular
identification.  What the sound turns out to be spectrographically might be
different from phonetic [I], but that is also immaterial to our phonological
identification, isn't it.

> Bob is not a native speaker of the same variety as me, and therefore his
analysis is like saying that because a speaker of a particular variety of
English cannot hear the difference between alveolar /t/ and dental /t/ in
Tamil, there is no distinction in Tamil.

No, it's like another speaker of Tamil saying that *to him* it sounds like
the one or the other variety of (apical/laminal) stop.

> Essentially, it is all very well for me and others to bandy our opinions
around, but these things can be tested empirically, and really should be,
before we come to any conclusions.

Again, what's being claimed here is far from clear.  Certainly no amount of
understanding of formant structure or other etic information constitutes a
valid test.  Only identification made by one or more speakers would be
linguistically valid, and if possible that test should be conducted under
normal conditions of "noisy channel", etc.  One can conceive of a number of
possible experiments, but the "experment" with Bob and Cecil is already
conclusive.  If Mark hears it differently, it merely shows that he has a
slightly different phonology and talks funny.  :-)

Bob Rankin