Re: Intergermansk

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> Intergermansk seems to have generated quite a bit of mail - nice to have
> things about conlangs  ;)
>
> On Wednesday, January 26, 2005, at 10:31 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Quoting "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@...>:
> >
> >
> >> Not occuring in continental Scandinavian? That's simply not true!
> >> I have a Swedish course from the Bussiness school in Helsinki, and they
> >> do
> >> have /x/ (and also /C/, e.g. in tj- words).
>
> There are English speakers who have [C] in words like _huge_ and _human_ -
> but the sound I was talking about is [x], which different.
>
> >> It also said that a good amount
> >> of speakers preferred to pronounce the /S/ sound (of sj- and sch- words)
> >>  as
> >> /x/. So I thought that /x/ would be just fine there.
> >
> > See my other mail. I'll just further not that there is no *other* /x/
> > sound than
> > the "/S/" sound of sj- and sch- words (which you, if you know what's good
> > for
> > you, won't *ever* pronounce as [S]!).
>
> Yep - obviously the stuff I have here about Swedish is a bit out of date.
> What, however, I was talking about was was the [x] which had developed
> from an earlier [k], where in English & Scandinavian we either have 'zero
> consonant' or /k/ (or in Danish /g/), for example:
[examples snipped]

Ah. That was not entirely clear.

> AFAIK the continental Scandinavian languages behave pretty much the same
> way as English in such words; they do not use [x].
True, with the marginal exception that [sk] went >[x] before front vowels, like
in _skepp_ [xEp:] "ship". Being contrarian, the Germans, of course, lost their
[x]'s here - _Schiff_ [SIf].

> I had not realized, I admit, that /S/ in modern Swedish was now (generally/
> always?) pronounced [x].
Other pronunciations are found, including reportedly [S], but I think it's fair
to say [x] is the standard one. It's often more-or-less rounded, especially
before rounded vowels, and sometimes it's weakened to [M\_0] (that's a vl velar
approximant) - I seem to recall Daniel Andreasson saying he's got that
pronunciation.

For some reason, there's been much reluctance to acknowledge this change, not
only wrt phonetic notation, but also when writing about other languages and
describing their sounds with reference to Swedish ones - I've seen more than
one textbook insist that German 'sch' and ich-laut are the same as Swedish 'sj'
and 'tj', and those were written in my lifetime (IOW, long after the change).

> That is interesting, and parallels the change of
> earlier Spanish /S/ to the modern /X/ as, for example, in _Mexico_
> /'meSiko/ --> _Mejico_ /'meXiko/.
Yup.

                                                      Andreas