Re: Phonology

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

>
> Grrrrrr... No, the [G]-sound is quite a Fremdkörper in Dutch, as is
> the word "Fremdkörper" itself.
Well, that's against everything I've been taught, whether by my Dutch teacher
or by most Dutch people I know. Dutch "g" *is* /G/. Only in the North of the
Netherlands it is realised [x] (and in ABN, it's supposed to be [G]).

 But you can hear a lot of them when a
> Dutch person is speaking German or French.
Or speaking Dutch, simply.

 Theoretically, it could
> appear in Dutch as well,
Not only it could, but it's a normal sound to appear.

 but this would sound a little strange to me.

Strange, my friend uses it all the time when he speaks Dutch. Didn't you hear
it?

> What we do have in Dutch, very common in southern dialects (including
> Flemish) is the so-called "soft g", but they are pronounced like
> palatal fricatives, either voiced [j\] or unvoiced [C] (the German
> ich-
> Laut). However, they substitute |g|, not |r|.
>
That is not true! My friend is from Brabant, and his "soft g" is certainly not
palatal! It's clearly a voiced velar fricative! His parents, who speak a
dialect very close to Flemish (they live at 5km from the Belgian border) also
use only a voiced velar fricative. It's a sound I can recognise very easily
from palatal fricatives (I personally like it, while palatal fricatives give me
bumps! :)) ), so I'm sure of what I say. And I've lived in Eindhoven and
everyone I heard there used a voiced velar fricative for "g", no palatal in
sight. In fact, I've never heard a Dutch person using a palatal fricative,
except when speaking German.

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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