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 [�] 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" [�]. RC> The entry for U+0429 (which they write as �') 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 [�] (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:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________ Chaos reigns within / Reflect, repent, and reboot / Order shall return
