Re: THEORY: more questions

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