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

 --- "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@...> schrieb:

> >German has the labiodental affricate [pf]
>
> Yes, but only in the middle of the word or at the
> end. Word-initial it is "f".
What about 'Pferd' and 'Pfeil', for two examples? I've
clearly heard them pronounced with an initial [pf],
though that may be reduced to [f] in informal
environments.

But it still confuses me, from what little I know of
the Germanic sound shifts. Didn't [pf] come from [pp]
(appel --> Apfel)? Does that mean that OHG had initial
long consonants :)?

> >and German dialects have an affricate usually
> > analyzed as [kx], but which could also be
> > described as [qX]. For what I know, both are very
> > unusual sounds, that is, there are very few
> > natlangs that feature them.
>
> Haven't ever heard it in any dialects I've
> witnessed... must be really rare then.
It's pretty common in Swiss, IIRC, and is the source
of a great deal of humor from the speakers of other
dialects that didn't undergo the second German sound
shift that gave the Swiss such monstrosities as their
pronunciation of 'Besteck' as [b@."StEqX] or something
like that.

Incidentally, the only other language I know of with
[qX] are a few Bantu languages. And Klingon, of course
:).

Incidentally, what's with the extreme poverty of
initial [x] in standard German? The only word I can
think of is 'Chaos', which can either be [xa.os] or
[ka.os], the latter pronunciation seeming to be the
more common. Hochdeutsch has [x] all over the place in
medial and final positions, but I've never seen it
initially with any degree of regularity.


	

	
		
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