Hello Rick,
RC> My native Russian speaker isn't available at the moment, but when she
RC> pronounced U+0429 for me this morning, it sounded like a single phoneme. And
RC> when I pronounced an ich-laut for her, she said it was the same sound.
Unfortunately, the latter experiment does not prove very much because
of categorial perception. A speaker from a language will always have a
certain "tolerance" with which they perceive phonemes. German native
speakers are an extreme case: almost everyone without phonetic
training will say that [ç] and [x] are the same *sound* (because
they're allophones of the same *phoneme*), even though they're really
different.
A similar case exists with Russian [l], for example. Because Russian
has two L-sounds ([l] and [l']), Russian [l] is usually "darker" and
more tense than, say, German [l]. However, when I produce a German [l]
and ask a Russian what sound it is, they will always say it's an [l],
even though their own realization of [l] is phonetically different.
And when I ask them to produce an [l] and then produce my own [l],
they will say that it's the same sound, even though it is a different
sound *phonetically* (because, of course, when asked whether A and B
are "the same sound", most people answer from their *phonological*
viewpoint).
If you want to experiment, ask her to say "chemistry" in Russian,
listen to the first phoneme, compare it to U+0429 (they *are*
different) and then figure out which one is "the ich-sound" [ç].
RC> The entry for U+0429 (which they write as Ø') sure looks and
RC> sounds like an ich-laut to me.
Oh, the entry for [x'] sounds so, too :-) For a native speaker of a
language other than Russian, both probably sound like it. For a native
speaker of German (like myself), *both* sound *different* from High
German [ç] (or at least my own idea of how "ich" *should* be
articulated in High German). (However, when speakers of Ripuarian (the
dialect of German in Bonn where I live) say "ich", it sound pretty
much like my idea of U+0429, whatever that signifies...)
Ah, this is all so complicated.
Philipp mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de
___________________
Chaos reigns within / Reflect, repent, and reboot / Order shall return
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