Is it just me, or does the vowel [\u00f8] (a close-mid front rounded vowel) sound a lot like [\u026f] (a close back unrounded vowel)?<\/p>\n
I first encountered [\u026f] when I studied Japanese (it’s the normal pronunciation of \/u\/), but I didn’t really think about it at the time.<\/p>\n
However, when I learned Scottish Gaelic, I heard the vowel normally written as ‘ao’ (as in aon<\/i> “one”) as [\u00f8], but I subsequently found out that it’s supposed to be [\u026f].<\/p>\n
When I then recently tried to find out how to pronounce Kim Jong-un (???), I first saw on John Wells’s blog<\/a> that it’s \/\u0261\u030aim d\u0325\u0291\u0325\u032f\u032f\u028c\u014b \u026fn\/ in IPA. However, if I listen to the last syllable in Google Translate<\/a> (click on the wee loudspeaker symbol next to \u00c4<\/b>), again it sounds very similar to a Danish \/\u00f8\/ (it’s possibly clearer without the final n<\/i><\/a>).<\/p>\n Are the two sounds really that similar acoustically, or is the Danish \/\u00f8\/ drifting towards [\u026f]?<\/p>\n If they really are very similar, that could explain why languages tend not to employ both front rounded and back unrounded vowels at the same time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is it just me, or does the vowel [\u00f8] (a close-mid front rounded vowel) sound a lot like [\u026f] (a close back unrounded vowel)? I first encountered [\u026f] when I studied Japanese (it’s the normal pronunciation of \/u\/), but I didn’t really think about it at the time. However, when I learned Scottish Gaelic, I heard the vowel normally written as ‘ao’ (as in aon “one”) as [\u00f8], but I subsequently found out that it’s supposed to be [\u026f]. When I then recently tried to find out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}