Talk:Close front compressed vowel

Front or central?

 * (Discussion moved from Close central rounded vowel Talk page)

The reason that the Swedish phoneme is described as central vowel is because it doesn't have the same characteristics as the other front vowels /i/, /y/, /e/ and /ø/, which all "soften" initial /k/ and /g/. Before the proper front vowels, /k/ has become and /g/ has become. This is not the case with, however. As an example the syllable structure /kVl/ can be used to illustrated this with the following minimal pairs:
 * kyl; "fridge";
 * köl; "keel"
 * kel; "petting, snuggling"
 * kil; "wedge"

however does not adhere to this pattern, but instead acts like a back vowel:
 * kol-; (rarely used) prefix refering to gall
 * kål; "cabbage"
 * kal; "barren"
 * kul; "fun"

Considering that these articles are as much about the symbols as the actual sounds they represent I'm not sure I agree with the information should be redirected the way it is now.

Peter Isotalo 19:43, 8 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Maybe it's obvious, but I think I should mention that all of these examples contain long vowels, which the IPA doesn't make clear. 85.226.122.152 11:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)


 * This is one phonological model, not phonetics. Your evidence tells us that was most likely not a front vowel when this palatalization took place. But it does not mean that  is not a front vowel today. If  is spoken in some traditions as a central vowel, we should certainly say that, and why (here a summary of your point would be valuable), but this kind of thing can be quite confusing if not fully explained. The IPA is at its core a phonetic alphabet.


 * By your symbol usage argument, the postalveolar affricates should be included in the articles on the palatal stops, for those are the symbols often used for them. Much better I think to put the phonetic postalveolar affricates in the articles for postalveolar affricates, and list the phonetic front vowels in the articles for front vowels, with clarification if need be. kwami 22:47, 2005 August 8 (UTC)


 * I don't agree with your interpretation about the scope of these articles. You might want to bring this up at project page rather than unilaterally deciding the scope of the contents of the individual articles. Considering how much some vowels can vary between certain dialects of certain languages it seems far too stringent to assume the approach you've chosen.
 * As for the (Central) Swedish (judging from your edits) you seem to be of the opinion that the only thing separating it from /y/ is the inrounding. Am I correct in this assumption? That would explain your argumentation somewhat better, but it's still a false assumption. I would also like to point out that while my pronunciation is the most common and the most widely accepted as a neutral spoken standard, more central realizations much closer to the cardinal value are very common in many Swedish dialects. Also, if we adapt your view on the scope of these articles and of phonetic transcription a lot of sounds would have to be moved around to satisfy these demands, starting with both the English and Japanese /u/ and the Turkish  which according to the vowel charts in the IPA handbook are just as much central as the Swedish vowel is front. Similar objections could be raised for the long-winded and quite unphonetic discussion of the usage and non-usage of  and  in transcribing English as well.
 * I don't mind fairly detailed comments, but actually reclassifying vowels in this manner seems way too high-handed to me. It just doesn't seem particularly informative.
 * Peter Isotalo 11:24, 9 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, you would know Swedish! Since we now have Norwegian as an example of the central vowel, maybe we could add a comment that some Swedish dialects belong there too? (I see you've added "Central" to "Swedish", and unfortunately been reverted. I certainly think it's best to be accurate as to which dialects we're covering, as you have.) But the Swedish central vowel is also compressed, correct? That would be worth mentioning.


 * Your assumtion of how I interpreted Swedish is correct, except that I recognize that it isn't as far front as /y/. If I'm wrong, I'd love to see what else distinguishes this vowel (within Central Swedish, I mean). As for other vowels, I think they should be moved if phonetically justified. Of course, many are rather indeterminate, such as Japanese (not particularly far forward, and within the range usually accepted as [u]; but this is arguable - perhaps an fronting diacritic would be appropriate?). The Turkish vowel would indeed probably be considered central if it were rounded, but for an unrounded vowel it's reasonably close to a cardinal back vowel. (Unrounded vowels are generally further front than rounded vowels; there's a good reason (or maybe happy coincidence) that in the IPA charts, unrounded is to the left and rounded to the right.)


 * Maybe we could have a "compressed central vowel" section, and put the Swedish there? But given how very far back Central Swedish compressed /u/ is, I wouldn't expect a compressed central vowel to be so far forward.


 * The English illustration, of course, is the pronunciation in California, and the Handbook makes the point that California [u] is rather far forward (in some areas, much more than it shows). But NZ English is already used as an illustration for the central vowel, and we could add Calif. if we wanted. Many English dialects do not have a fronted /u/, and I see no reason not to use them to illustrate [u] (except of course that they're diphthongized). As for the, this is indeed a mess, and certainly needs to be clarified. Because the is so entrenched, perhaps we are forced to have two entries, where it is phonetically, and the symbol used.  isn't as much a problem that way. That should simply be corrected. (Although, since this is an English-language encyclopedia, it's not unreasonble to have a comment along the lines of this sound does not occur in English, but the English sound X is somewhat close to it.)


 * Readers get frustrated, and justifiably so, when we describe things other than as they are. One of the problems here is that people often use the IPA as a phonemic alphabet, and tend to stick to ASCII characters as much as possible. I think we should do better than that for the purposes of illustrating a phonetic alphabet. And if languages don't end up where people expect them, then they'll learn something. But giving false impressions of what the IPA represents, simply because it's convenient, I feel is irresponsible and unworthy of an encyclopedia, where people come to resolve such questions. kwami 20:19, 2005 August 9 (UTC)


 * Generally, I would say that listing the sound under the symbols used would cause the least amount of confusion, but there are sure to be plenty of examples would make no sense if they followed that rule. I think we should take the easy way out and simply not use examples from dialects that are clearly problematic, including the Central Swedish . Any objections to that?
 * Mentioning English sounds similar to a certain sound would certainly work as long as it's clearly explained how the sound is different.
 * Peter Isotalo 21:41, 13 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Oops! For some reason I didn't see this comment until just now, when I checked to see what happened to the close front compressed vowel.


 * I would agree completely, except that Central Swedish is the only example we have of a close front compressed vowel. The symbol used isn't inappropriate, since there is no IPA symbol. Your objections to it seem to be that it doesn't behave phonologically like the other Swedish front vowels, but although interesting, that's not really relevant to an article on phonetics. Perhaps you also feel that it shouldn't be included because it's more central than the /i/ or /y/? That's worth mentioning, as it is in the case of English /u/, but Ladefoged accepts that it is front (more or less), and I doubt we're going to find a better example, especially not in a language that everyone has heard of. The cost of removing this is that we now have no coverage of an interesting phonetic contrast.


 * What say we create three new articles for the compressed vowels, and just link to them? That way someone trying to figure out what [y] is won't be confused by the added complexity, but anyone who's interested can still track it down. kwami 09:01, 2005 August 20 (UTC)


 * Nah. A whole darned article just for compression seems over the top when we have so much room left in these. You got a good point about including inrounding (as usual), so just revert me and put it back. Let's also make sure people don't remove the mention of "Central" so that "Swedish" doesn't gets more or less equated with "Stockholm dialect".
 * Peter Isotalo 09:15, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Done. Moving this discussion to that page. kwami 20:28, 2005 August 20 (UTC)
 * By the way, what happens to this vowel in closed syllables? It Central Swedish full [fɵl] also inrounded? Seems we can get a lot of milage out of your language! kwami 20:39, 2005 August 20 (UTC)


 * PS. I linked the 'central' of Central Swedish to Stockholm. You might want to change that to a more appropriate link; I just wanted s.t. robust enough to escape deletion. kwami 06:36, 2005 August 24 (UTC)


 * The dialect area is much larger than just the greater Stockholm region, so I removed the link. If anyone wants to mess it with it again, we'll just have to explain that "Central Swedish" is common enough to get featured in the IPA handbook.
 * Only and /u/ are inrounded, and none of the short vowels are and closed syllables with long vowels retain their frication, but lose the the schwa glide they have when being in an open vowel. All long vowels, however, have very similar diphtongs and slight frication before the glide. An interesting side note is that I've noticed that some people that are around my age who use the centralized  (something that results in a very distinct "buzzing" quality to their pronunciation) seem to extend this to pronunciation of /j/, and not just in the rather few contexts where it could be considered a mere vowel glide.
 * Peter Isotalo 07:59, 1 September 2005 (UTC)


 * So you're saying they have an approximant [ j ]? Wow, I can see how that would produce a buzzing sound - pretty neat! kwami 08:59, 2005 September 1 (UTC)


 * This is something I noticed just yesterday in my phonetics class (just a week of general phonetics as part of the Mandarin course), so don't take me for granted here. But I must say that your ad hoc symbol is very compelling. I'll pay extra attention to the guy who has the pronunciation today and ask my teacher about it.
 * Peter Isotalo 09:11, 1 September 2005 (UTC)