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Re: Koningin

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, June 10, 2002, 7:11
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.

Replies

Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>
Maarten van Beek <dungeonmaster@...>