I have to admit that I don't understand the difference between long and short vowels. Like a and á or e and é. Would you just accent a long vowel sort of speak, in order to make it longer. Ukolébavka = UK - o - LE - bav - ka? Or do the two vowels actually sound different. i being more like "pit" and í being more like "peet"? Most of the czech I've gotten to listen to is in song so I think that makes it harder to pick up on pronunciational differences. Thank you for the help P.S. I am just beggining to learn Czech. just so you know
Have you tried the pronunciation guide on locallingo.com? It is excellent. I would advise anyone starting to learn czech to visit this site. Regards Phil
Contrary to English, Czech long and short vowels are the same sound, only the duration for which they are pronounced is different. The duration of pronunciation of Czech vowels is also slightly longer than in English. Thus a and á is exactly the same sound (this goes for all Czech vowels), á is just pronounced longer.
Maybe it is true for a and á, but certainly not for i and í (or y and ý); i and í are slightly different sounds.
I'm not quite sure you are right about this. The general phonetic representation of: Code: i and y is [i], í and ý is [i:], e is [ɛ], e is [ɛ:] u is [u], ů and ú is [u:] a is [a], á is [a:] Surely there may be differences in dialects, but as far as I know the 'official' pronounciation is as above. :? Perhaps you are referring to the common habit of replacing the letter ý with ej (pronounced ey) as in dobrej and replacing é with í as in mlíko?
I hear some difference between i/y and í/ý, e.g. in lyže and lýko (at least in my vernacular, which is Common Czech), but I am not an expert in orthoepy.
As far as I can judge from the recordings I have, the long vowels of Czech are the same as the short ones; they are simply twice as long if not more in some case. They are pure canonical vowels as represented in phonetics. Thus they are completely different from English vowels, none of which being canonical. I suppose that a native speaker of English will have a hard time reproducing them without some training. Conversely French, Italian and Spanish speakers should find them easy to utter.
Qcumber, I'm not sure what you mean by "canonical" vowels. If I understand correctly, you are distinguishing a single sound from dipthong vowels (e.g. the English long "o" which is essentially a dipthong of the Czech [canonical] "o" and the short "i" in English). If this is the case, then I disagree about no English vowel sound being canonical. Examples: short "e" as in "pet" -> same as Czech "e" long "e" as in "bead" -> same as Czech "y" Wikipedia agrees with me on the short "e", giving the phonetic symbol [ɛ] for this vowel sound, which was already pointed out by mravenec as the correct pronunciation of the Czech "e." It also lists the long "e" as on the American pronunciation. By the way, as a native English speaker, I found it quite easy to reproduce Czech vowel sounds. They are actually quite simple in comparison to English vowel sounds. Generally the only real difficulties I've seen Americans or Brits come across with Czech vowels is the Czech "o" where they often use the dipthonged long "o" in English, the Czech "u" (again dipthonging it in the English long "oo"), and the Czech "i" where many don't soften the previous consonant. Usually native English speakers have much more pronunciation difficulties with the consonants. I also disagree with mravenec that the duration of pronunciation of Czech vowels is longer than in English. I would say that the Czech short vowels are the same or even shorter than English vowels, with the Czech long vowels being generally longer than in English. It is sometimes a difficult comparison, as in English we have so many dipthong vowel sounds.
Sova, In simple terms, when the international phonetic association was founded in the 19th century, they decided the basic vowels of French /i, e, Ɛ, æ, a, Ɔ, o, u/ should be the canonical ones (a bit like the seven canonical notes on a musical scale: do, ré, mi, fa, sol, la, si). These are mapped on a triangle where each of them marks a reference position. The other vowels of French, and those of other languages, are positioned on the triangle by comparison with the canonical vowels. All the simple vowels (short or long) of Czech are canonical. No English vowel is canonical. I have heard native speakers of English (without any training) having a go at French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Czech, and generally they distort all the vowels. You must be gifted if being a native speaker of English, you can utter the vowels of Czech correctly. Congratulations. Perhaps you already had some training in another language with canonical vowels (this is not to diminish your merit).
Thanks for the explanation. International Phonetic Association, eh? Hmm... Let me guess, it was founded by a bunch of Frenchmen, right? :wink: I'm still confused that the same international phonetic sound is attributed to both the Czech "e" and the English short "e" (as well as the French "e"). How then can you say that no English vowel sound is canonical if the Czech and French vowel sounds are canonical? Are there multiple pronunciations of the same international phonetic symbol?!! That would seem to defeat the whole purpose of an international phonetic system. If the three vowel sounds are identical, and one is canonical, they must all be canonical. The same logic could be applied to the American pronunciation of long "e" . Yes, I did have training in other languages before Czech, namely Spanish and Russian. But I had no trouble with the vowel sounds in either of those languages either (except the Russian "ы" which is not canonical, and doesn't appear in any other language that I'm aware of).
A "bunch" of dedicated British, French and German scholars, Sova. They also had many correspondents from other countries. Their journal (Le maître phonétique) was in French (in the 19th century French was an international language). After WWII, it was decided English would be the medium of the association. As regards your second concern, I can only say that you are broaching the problem of broad and narrow phonetic transcriptions. There are diacritics to indicate how far or close a vowel is to the canonical one, but they are seldom used. Although English [e] as in bed is closer to French [Ɛ] as in Bède le Vénérable, the convention is to represent it by [e] while French é [e] as in été is also represented by [e]. For English, [Ɛ] is used to transcribe the first vowel of bear although it is more open than the ê of French être "to be, being", also transcribed as [Ɛ]. Of course all this is unsatisfactory.
I was a bit confused by this term at first as well. A more frequent term for this is cardinal vowels (which to makes a lot more intuitive sense to me than canonical). Qcumber, please correct me if this is not what you meant by canonical... You might well be right. I've done some research and the pronunciation sounds i gave above were a bit imprecise and general. It seems a more accurate representation of Czech vowels according to the IPA would be Code: [ɪ] for short i/y [ɪ:] for long í/ý [ʊ] for short u [ʊ:] for long ú after d, t and n (ie ď, ť and ň), í is pronounced [i:], however. This still does not explain why you perceive a difference in quality between y and ý. Maybe there is a slight difference because ž is voiced and k is not. You'll have to find a few examples where y and ý is surrounded by the same consonants (like lyž/lýž or lyk/lýk, but preferably existing words) to be sure it is not the preceding or following sound that influence the pronunciation.
You are right, Mravenec, the correct expression is "cardinal vowels". Sorry. From what you and Zeizig write, /i/ and /u/ in Czech are not realized as cardinal vowels.
