Re: CHAT: Contractions in colloquial German (was: Re: articles)

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 00:22:55 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Did you misunderstand me? They *do* say [sSvImn=] in Aachen; I said they do
>*not* necessarily refrain from it when it creats abstruse initial clusters.
My bad, I read what I wanted to read and not what you had written...


>Reportedly, in Zürcher dialect they have a "strong" and a "weak" [d_0] for
>_der_ and _die_. Are you familiar with this phenomenon? I suppose you would
>want to say it's [t:] and [t]?
According to the measurements I've read I'd say that the fortis/lenis
opposition of Swiss German stops is better described in terms of long stops
vs. short stops.

I don't know how this is possibly related to the definite articles, since in
the Züri dialect they are /t@/ for masculinum and /t:/ for femininum (the
latter's point of articulation often coarticulatorily adapted to a following
consonant).


>(That's reportedly as in a linguistically naive friend of mine who has a
>keen ear for dialectal features and speaks fluent Swiss German told me it
>over a couple of beers. I couldn't hear the supposed difference when he
>reproduced it.)
Measurements have shown that in the first sound after a pause, there's no
audible difference between long and short consonants of Swiss German. The
difference of initial long and short consonants is only perceived after
words that end with voiced sounds (vowels or /l, r, m, n, N/).

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust