Nasality pa svenska

Hej,

Kou skrev:

> Okay, so I'm thinking that, without the benefit of having met a
> native speaker since I decided to learn Swedish, I've managed to
> develop a reasonably unembarassing Swedish accent, grave and acute
> accents and all.
Heh :-) Now my accent is quite misleading, 'cause my _r_'s are uvular,
but of course they make my _rt_'s, _rd_'s, _rn_'s and _rs_'s
postalveolar...

Finns det folk som studerar också svenska här, I wonder? :-) (hur säger
man 'I wonder' på svenska? ;-))

> Now a tape I picked up in Japan on learning Swedish has a guy and a
> woman on it. The guy speaks normally, but the chick has, how shall I
> put this, a definite twang in her voice. I chocked it up to her
> individual pronunciation and as something I did not wish to imitate,
> and left it at that. But I was watching OP:7 on TV the other night
> (is everyone in Sweden that cute? heck, even the shlubs on the show
> are good-looking), and a couple of the characters had the same kind
> of, for lack of a better term, tinny nasality.  I can't describe the
> phenomenon well, and I can't reproduce it, but natives, what is it
> that I'm noticing? A regionalism? Swedes with deviated septa or cleft
> palates? I mean "by" sounds like /by~~~~~/, fint like /fi~~~~nt/, etc.
Hm. Not that I have noticed anything, neither on tapes (We're using The
Swedish Institute's _Svenska utifrån_, which is reasonably un-phony -
well at least definitely less phony than ALL the English textbooks I've
ever had, and a certain _Mål 1_, which isn't that good) nor on the
radio. But then, it may be a regionalism, since I definitely remember
reading that Swedish used to have nasalised vowels at some point in
history, or else indeed a feature of gender-defined (or is it
socially-defined?) pronunciation, like the more diphthongoid Russian
women's _o_.

Hej då,
Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

Is mall a mharcaicheas am fear a bheachdaicheas
                 --Scottish proverb

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