> 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