--- In cybalist@..., Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer@...> wrote:

> Could it be of interest that the Arabic letter names ka:f and qa:f

have

> prescribed pronunciations with very different vowels, ka:f having

the long

> counterpart of Eng. man (which actually is long in most varieties of
> English), while qa:f has the vowel of Eng. call or crawl? Great

variation

> is expected in systems with few phonemes.
>

Yes, that agrees with my (as a speaker of Russian and Lithuanian)
perception of the Arabic uvulars or pharyngealized consonants
as "hard" (velarised) and the rest as "soft" (palatalized) (the same
applies mutatis mutandis to post-consonantal vowels). But "hardening"
is not that causes [e] ->[a], at least my language intuition says
that when "hardened" [e] is lowered (as in Russian) or shifted one
step back to become mid-central vowel (resembling Russian [y] in
_mylo_) as in some High Lithuanian dialects, but not lowered 2 steps
and shifted back 1-2 steps to become some kind of [a].

Sergei