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

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 1, 2005, 23:22
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