Re: CHAT: affricates/grammar help/intransitivity/free word order

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 22:06:29 +1100, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:

>Could someone do me a favor and explain in one nice post what Pascal's
>position is and why it is wrong?

1. He repeatedly and very emphatically claimed that standard German
distinguishes distinguishes short /e/ and /&/. See:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0410A&L=conlang&P=R16699

Standard German has only one short e-phoneme, which is usually called /E/.
The reference for standard German is the Duden, but there are also countless
linguistic analysis of the use of German. He's never given any evidence at
all that would support his strange point of view.

He accused all persons and evidences that don't support his view of being
influenced by English (e.g. in the same post as above), apart from violently
insulting them.


2. He deliberately ignores the rules for the distribution of |ss| and |ß|
that were used before the German spelling reform. Instead, he's come up with
two different confuse ideas about it. He first claimed that |ss| is written
when the two |s| don't belong to the same syllable:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0410B&L=conlang&P=R4450

However, the rules for syllable division can only apply after you've decided
whether you write |ss| or |ß|: Where |ß| isn't used any more (Switzerland),
it's _heis-ser_ ('hotter'), where |ß| is used, it's _hei-ßer_.

So he came up with another confusing idea (which is difficult to abbreviate):
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0410B&L=conlang&P=R5476

I showed him that according to this idea, the word |heißer| would have to be
written with |ss| which is wrong.


3. He claims that the new rules for the distribution of |ss| and |ß| don't
make sense and are more complicated than the old ones.

Before the German spelling reform, the distribution depended on two
different conditions: Whether the preceding vowel is short or long and
whether a vowel follows or not (with the marginal exception that Wortfuge
counts as 'no vowel'). In the reform, the second condition was dropped, so
there's only one condition left instead of two.

Even after I've repeatedly explained him these rules, he still deliberately
and very rudely ignores them:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0412C&L=conlang&P=R1483


4. He claimed that the standard German pronunciation of final |üß| is always
/Ys/:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0412C&L=conlang&P=9729

Before the spelling reform, it could be /y:s/ in words such as |grüß|
('greet' imperative) or /Ys/ in words such as |küß| ('kiss' imperative), so
his claim is wrong. After the spelling reform, the only possible
pronunciation is /y:s/.


5. He claimed that |sp| and |st| are always pronounced /Sp/, /St/,
regardless of the position in the word:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0412B&L=conlang&P=R8347

In standard German, these pronunciations are only found at the beginning of
a syllable; words like |Ast| ('bough'), |Espe| ('aspen') are pronounced
/ast/, /'Esp@/.


6. He claimed that the pronunciation of /pf/ depends on the syllable
division, that is, that it's not the same in |hüp-fen| and in |Kopf|:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0410B&L=conlang&P=R3707

Maybe there's a relation to his peculiar ideas about the ß-rules.


gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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