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

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 21:38:01 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> >You don't have _'s_ for _das_? In Aachen they have it whenever possible
> >(which is not to say they refrain from it when it's impossible!), and I've
> >heard it or heard it reported from other bits of Germany and Switzerland
> too.
> >
> >(By "impossible" I mean when it creates initial consonantal clusters no sane
> >human would want to associate with, as in _'s Schwimmen_ [sSvImn=].)
>
> :)
>
> Don't say that! You might offense those Swiss people who do pronounce it
> that way /'sSv\ym@/ (though I guess they'd rather be proud of it).
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.

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]?

(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.)

                                                             Andreas