Re: En något ogrannlaga fråga om svenska

Ogrannlaga? Inte ett ord jag hör eller ser med ngn nämnvärd frekvens ...

Quoting "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>:

> Okay, so I stumbled on "skita" in the dictionary a few weeks back.
> Now *every* book and dictionary I have on Swedish says something to
> the effect of, "Now *Swedes* don't pronounce it this way (say, a word
> like "station") /staSon/ (the "o" here is supposed to be the omegoid
> thingy), but *you* should 'cause /staxon/ is too hard for foreigners
> to pronounce." What's the biggy, I say to myself? It's just a /x/,
> isn't it? That's how I do it, but then, I don't have native speakers
> to inflict my Swedish on. But I digress. Are there Swedes out there
> who pronounce this /xita/? Is it in free variation with /Sita/?
> Normally I'd expect both, but I thought maybe here, because the
> latter sounds akin to the English, it might pack a more expletive
> punch. Not that *I* ever speak that way, of course, but I'm just
> curious. Perhaps I'm over-thinking this. Perhaps it's good I'm back
> to my day job.
Ah, the good ol' 'sj' mess.

Short answer: use [x].

Long answer: There is no doubt that the phoneme is the one traditionally
indicated as /S/. There is no phoneme traditionally indicated as /x/, so
**/xita/ is right out. The issue is the pronunciation.

In my 'lect, /S/ is, in syllable initial position*, [x]. It gets more or less
labialized before rounded or labialized vowels. Most 'lects similarly shows
unvoiced velar fricatives or approximants, often labialized. A few dialects do
have [S], but this sounds quite odd to me, since [S] in my 'lect is the
realization of /C/. If you otherwise spoke something approximating the standard
language ("rikssvenska"), I'd hear [Si:ta] as a non-existing word /Ci:ta/
(likely spely |tjita|). Now, /C/ is more commonly [s\], but that's still closer
to [S] than [x] is. The "too hard for foreigners to pronounce" thing comes from
the fact that the standard once had [x\] (simultaneous [x] and [S]), which
indeed is fairly tough to acquire. You can probably still find people who
pronunce it this way, but it's anything but common, and I'd certainly recommend
[x] over it to foreigners (at least unless they're freaks for whom [x\] is
easier to pronounce than [x]!).

(Yes, the traditional phonemic notation is quite insane.)

Medium answer: Use [S] if you want to sound like an inbred Norrlander, [x\] if
you want to sound pretentious, and [x] if you want to sound like a human being.
:)

* Let's, for now, not speak of syllable-final position - it here appears to be a
phonological incompability between my 'lect and the one usually described in
phonology textbooks.

                                                  Andreas

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