On Thursday, January 6, 2005, at 02:56 , Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 6 Jan 2005, at 1.24 pm, Elliott Lash wrote:
>
>> --- Muke Tever <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
[snip]
>>> English doesn't have [a], though it does have [A]
>>> and [{]. It doesn't seem to be easy for native
>>> English
>>> speakers to produce, as generally when they try to
>>> produce
>>> it (e.g. in pronouncing Spanish words) they come up
>>> with,
>>> surprise surprise, [A] or [{] (in America, usually
>>> the
>>> former).
>>
>>
>> English has /a/, at least I think the words "on", and
>> "father", and many others contain this sound.

[snip]
> As to Maxime's second question, about words like 'battle' and 'pack',
> some dialects, particularly British and English-as-a-foreign-language
> ones, use [a] in these words,

True as far English-as-a-foreign-language - but as a Brit born & bred, the
former statement is a bit misleading. The southern English pronunciation
is CXS [&]; this is also used in some Scots Lowland & other dialects. [a]
is used in these words in Welsh English, the Scottish highlands and many
(all?) northern English dialects.

> but Americans and Australians generally
> have [&], a higher, fronter vowel here (or one even higher and
> fronter).

Yep the Brit RP is [&] - the Australian certainly tends to sound more like
[E] to us Brits. And Merkans quite often have something more like [I@] now.

[snip]
> At any rate, all vowels are 'easy' to produce---it just depends on what
> phonemes your native speech had that you learnt as a child. Babies (at
> a particular stage of their linguistic development) can distinguish
> more sounds than you or me.

Yep.
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On Thursday, January 6, 2005, at 03:13 , # 1 wrote:

>> At any rate, all vowels are 'easy' to produce---it just depends on what
>> phonemes your native speech had that you learnt as a child. Babies (at a
>> particular stage of their linguistic development) can distinguish more
>> sounds than you or me.
>
> Are you sure? any french speaker can know if someone who speaks french
> have
> english as natal language with the pronounciation of the vowel [y]

Isn't this what Tristan was saying? "it just depends on what phonemes your
native speech had that you learnt as a child"

A baby has a 'blank sheet' - all vowels are 'easy'. What later we find
easy or difficult depends upon what we learnt as children.

> Except if the person lived in a french envirronment since a long time, an
> english natal speaker will say the sound [y] like [Y] or [}]

Eh? This is, with respect, a gross generalization. It runs counter to my
experience.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]