Re: Phonology

En réponse à Irina Rempt <irina@...>:

>
> What?! Everything I've been taught points to it being [x] in ABN.
> There's no difference in ABN pronunciation between "lach" and "lag";
> both are [lAx]. The voiced version is southern dialect.
>
Not what I've heard and read. My first "Teach Yourself Dutch" book (from a
quite reputable house of edition) was explicitly based on ABN and wrote that
|ch| and |g| are different: |ch| is the unvoiced [x], |g| the voiced [G]. my
teacher said the same about ABN, adding that of course nobody spoke that way.
And finally a Dutch-English dictionary I've seen writes the same thing in its
description of sounds. So basically I have three different and unrelated
sources that say that ABN is supposed to have both [x] and [G], but that nobody
talks that way.

>
> You've said it! It's a *voiced* velar fricative because he's from
> Brabant. What people from Brabant speak is not the standard, much as
> they'd like it to be: it's an accepted regional variant.
>
But the Northern speech is not standard either. It's also only an accepted
regional variant, whatever the Northerners say. Really, nobody except maybe
foreigners and the queen speak the standard (though the queen speaks more
a "queen's Dutch" AFAIK).

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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