GWendel:
> <What about -ay as in "No hay nada"?
Pablo:
> I've spoken spanish all my life (Born and bred in Ecuador and lived there
till two years ago) and I can tell you there are NO more than 5 vowels in
spanish. The "o" in Historia and Seņor sound *exactly* alike and must be
pronounced that way. "Hay" is an exception, when the Y (greek i, as we call
it)is AFTER a vowel, then there is a diphtong, so basically HAY is "a" + "y"
(Or, to illustrate my point, the greek "Y" serves the function of the latin
"i").<
Ok, so a native speaker of Spanish confirmed what I hear. I was afraid I was
getting deaf. hehe
I think GWendel touched a controversial topic: ( off-glides versus
diphthongs in English ) versus diphthongs in Romance-languages.
I'll quote 'Teaching American English Pronunciation' again:
"Another way in which vowels can differ is in terms of muscle tension in the
mouth. We say that vowels produced with extra muscle tension are tnese and
that vowels produced without this tension is lax. Compare the vowels in
'beat' and 'bit'. Both of these vowels are made with the front part of the
tongue high in the mouth. They differ in the degree of muscle tension with
which they are produced. you should feel that your facial muscles are more
tense in the pronunciation of 'beat' than in 'bit'. This causes a greater
spreading of the lips in 'beat'."
"There are 3 tense/lax vowel pairs in English: the vowel of:
'beat' and 'bit' [/iy/ x /I/]
'bait' and 'bet' [ /ey/ x /E/]
'boot' and 'book' [ /uw/ x /U/]"
"The tense vowels are longer and also involve some tongue movement during
their pronunciation..."
"The vowel sound in 'boat' /ow/ is also a tense vowel but there is no
directly corresponding lax vowel..." They cite some dialectal controversies
regarding that, but I won't copy them.
After that introduction, take a look at what they say later:
"Notice that the symbols used here to represent the tense vowels of English,
/iy/, /ey/, /ow/, and /uw/, have two parts. The front vowels /iy/ and /ey/
are composed of the pure vowels /i/ and /e/ followed by the semi-vowel /y/.
The back vowels /uw/ and /ow/ are composed of the pure vowels /u/ and /o/
followed by the semi-vowel /w/. These semi-vowels are usually referred to as
off-glides and reflect the fact that there is movement of the tongue during
the pronunciation of each of the tense vowels. IN MANY LANGUAGES OF THE
WORLD, THESE TENSE VOWELS ARE NOT FOLLOWE BY OFF-GLIDES, BUT ARE PURE
VOWELS. Thus, when ESL students pronounce the tense vowels of English, they
often omit the semi-vowel, producing vowels that sound to the English ear
more like the lax counterparts of the tense vowels, that is, /I/, /E/, and
/U/."
"There are three complex vowel sounds ( or diphthongs ) in English: the
vowels in 'bough' [/aw/], 'buy' [/ay/] and 'boy' [/oy/]. These are
considered to be complex vowel sounds because they consist of a vowel
followed by a semi-vowel... As we saw, the tense vowels, /iy/, /ey/. /ow/,
and /uw/, are also represented with semi-vowels because they involve
movement of the tongue. We are not classifying the tense vowels as
diphthongs because there is less tongue movement with these vowels than with
the diphthongs /ay/, /aw/, and /oy/."
I think GWendel assumed that Spanish diphthong, /ay/, was a single vowel
because English speakers ( except for phoneticians from Oxford University
who write books on pronunciation... hehe ) regard any diphthong pair as a
single vowel. He just extended to /ay/, and would have probably done the
same to /aw/ and /oy/, what he does to their tense vowels. On the other
hand, it's hard for most us to produce or even believe that a single vowel
may actually be composed by two sounds, as are their tense vowels.
That must explain why English speakers just can't say 'ballet' without that
extra /y/ in the end and do vocalises such as /ney/, /ney/, /ney/, instead
of /ne/, /ne/, /ne/ only, or /gow/, /gow/, /gow/ instead of /go/, /go/,
/go/.
bye,
Caio Rossi
Sao Paulo, Brazil
|
