Re: Koningin

En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>
> To be honest, I have never noticed any such problem.
Yet it's around your place of living that it happens most :)) .

 It's true that we
> once had
> a politician who had a tendency toward a very strange pronunciation of
> certain
> Dutch words; he used to say "kannegin". But it seems to me, that if one
> can
> pronounce [N] in the middle of a word, (s)he can pronounce it at its
> beginning
> as well.
But that's the main problem. Most Dutch people pronounce [N] only at the end of
a word. Cases like |koningin| are an exception to that rule.

> Perhaps this is a southern problem as well? (Gosh, it seems that those
> Brabanders and Limburgers really have a problem pronouncing their own
> language
> :))) )
No, I've noticed that in the South they tend to pronounce the word without a
problem (and in general, I find that Southerners have a much clearer
pronunciation of Dutch than Northerners. The Northerners tend to swallow their
syllables a little too much for me to follow them. So if someone in Holland has
problems pronouncing their own language, it's not in the South that you'll find
them :)) ). The report I'm referring to was done in The Hague, Amsterdam and
Rotterdam :))) . The pronunciations I heard in that report ranged from
[konigin] to [koniniN] passing by [koniNgin]. But there were still people who
could pronounce it without a problem. But the whole point is that even the ones
who pronounced it correctly were not sure that they were pronouncing it OK, and
admitted it to be a difficult word.

> Or is it just that some people might find it hard to pronounce a [N]
> between
> two [n]'s?
>
The speech therapist that was interviewed for that report was basically saying
that, but added that the anomalous place of [N] in the middle of the word was
an aggravating point.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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