Re: *oy vey*

On Tuesday 09 April 2002 22:29, Dirk Elzinga wrote:
> At 2:26 PM +0200 04/09/02, Maarten van Beek wrote:
> >Wat een vlauwekul... I mean, flauwekul! Voiced and voiceless initial
> >fricatives are phonemically distinct, as can be seen by looking at
> > these minimal pairs in Dutch:
>
> But not in all varieties. For instance, my mother doesn't voice
> initial <v> or <z>. Of course she's from Amsterdam, so one wouldn't
> expect it of her.
I don't, either, and I'm from Haarlem (16 km west of Amsterdam). My
normal speech is cultured Noord-Holland, though I can fall into
something approaching dialect (only pronunciation, not distinctive
words any longer, I've been gone too long and never lived there very
long in the first place) when I'm with someone who speaks it.

A funny thing on those lines happened when I went to buy a gas stove in
Beverwijk (6 km north of Haarlem and in the heart of the region where
they speak my kind of dialect), three houses ago, with my husband and
father-in-law: the vendor was the kind of man who speaks only to men on
principle, but when he'd heard all three of us speaking he spoke only
to me.

   Irina

--
irina@valdyas.org  Back up, but not perfect yet: www.valdyas.org/irina
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| Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else. |
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