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Re: Phonology

From:Maarten van Beek <dungeonmaster@...>
Date:Friday, April 26, 2002, 16:19
> Van: Christophe Grandsire > Onderwerp: 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.
Well, I agree with Irina and Jan. I hear no difference between "g" and "ch". I think that it is just some people's obsessions with the idea that if it is written differently, it must be pronounced differently. I know people who says they can hear the difference between "ou" and "au".
> > 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).
Off course, all variations of Dutch are regional variations from some kind of abstract, unspoken mean. Since in a mjority of the dialects and by a majority of the speakers "ch" and "g" are realized [x], I would say that that is the standard of Dutch, and [G] is a regional variation. Maarten