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Re: THEORY: more questions

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Tuesday, November 25, 2003, 18:28
Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:


> "eu, äu" = [oj] is interesting, an example of what's known as "misphasing of > roundness". It's fairly rare. You have an original sequence of > > [low front unround V] [high back round vowel/glide] > > changing to: > > [low back round V] [high front unr. V/glide]-- you can see which features > have switched places.
It would be thusly interesting, weren't it for the fact that in most variants of German, incl Standard Modern High German, this diphthong is rounded thru- out. Duden gives the pronunciations as [Oy] - most other dictionaries and and textbooks I've seen give [OY] or [O2], but all agree on rounding thru-out. Now, "eu" and "äu" has different ancestry (altho this is not always reflected accurately in modern spelling) - while the former indeed comes from something like [EU], the later comes IIRC from [2y], the spelling chosen mostly to underline the connection with "au" [AU] (which used to be something like [OU], explaining how it got umlauted to [2y]). Andreas