Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 February 18

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February 18

Tense and lax vowels

For some reason, tense vowels are easier for me to feel as if they were followed by a voiced consonant when they are being said by themselves; lax vowels are easier to feel as if they were followed by a voiceless consonant. For example:

Saying "eh" is easy for me to feel as if I were saying "pet"; saying "ee" is easy for me to feel as if I were saying "seed" (in both cases with the initial consonant unimportant.) Please try making both kinds of vowels by yourself and see if you can find why this is true. Georgia guy (talk) 02:08, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

I can't say that I understand your premise. In any case, "eh", to a Canadian, rhymes with "bay", "day", "hay", "jay", "lay", etc. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 03:33, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- First of all, for most purposes it's better to speak of Checked and free vowels with respect to English, since checked vowels have a clear and simple definition (vowels which, when stressed, can't appear finally in ordinary words -- as opposed to interjections and imitations of sheep bleatings), while that's not really the case for "lax" and "tense". Also, if you use IPA symbols, then you're less likely to be misunderstood. I don't really know what "feeling" means in the way that you use it, but vowels generally have slightly lengthened allophones before voiced sounds, and slightly shorted allophones before voiced sounds. There may also be phonation differences... AnonMoos (talk) 09:13, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Gg, I don't quite get what you mean by it "being easier to feel" vowels "as if they were". Do you find it harder to imagine bee as an onset of bees than of beet? See also Tenseness#Consonants, specifically the contrast between [p t k] and [b d ɡ] in German, suggesting a correspondence between tense/lax and unvoiced/voiced.  --Lambiam 09:31, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Where's the question? Bazza (talk) 09:48, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

There is a (leading) question hiding in "see if you can find why this is true".  --Lambiam 20:49, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

So a correct answer might be: "we have no way of knowing why Georgia guy feels something he can't coherently describe about something that may be unique to his own ideolect"? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.58.107 (talk) 08:19, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

That seems to be it: He wants the internet to explain to him why he has trouble pronouncing certain words. Kind of like with the British subject "maths", which is hard to say without sounding like Daffy Duck or Sylvester. But at least that has an explanation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:09, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Not hard at all. Just say "meths", "moths", or "myths" but get the vowel wrong. Bazza (talk) 13:42, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

unless you live in New Zealand or South Africa, then those would be the correct vowel sounds as well --Jayron32 16:24, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

One wonders, Baseball Bugs, if the Founding Fathers managed to pronounce their self-evident truths "without sounding like Daffy Duck". Alansplodge (talk) 20:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, a lot of them wore duck-tail wigs. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:30, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Did you mean idiolect (or the concept formerly so spelt)? —Tamfang (talk) 01:43, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

In English – at least my dialect – we tend to hold vowels longer before voiced consonants than before unvoiced consonants. How that's relevant here, I cannot say exactly, but tense vowels like /i/ may feel longer than lax vowels like /ɛ/. —Tamfang (talk) 01:43, 25 February 2020 (UTC)