On Friday 26 April 2002 13:25, Christophe wrote:
> 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].
Even the most recent "Teach Yourself Dutch" is from the nineteen-fifties
and has been updated only cursorily. I know the beast.
> my
> teacher said the same about ABN, adding that of course nobody spoke
> that way.
Of course they don't; they used to fifty years ago, though.
I had the same experience in Denmark last summer: what I thought. from
my mother's stories, was pronounced [ej] is now firmly [aj] and what I
thought was [A] is now [E]. The pronunciation changed in a couple of
decades.
> 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.
If all your sources are *both* right *and* recent, I rest my case.
> 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).
The de-facto standard is the speech of educated people in the southern
part of Noord-Holland (and has been since the seventeenth century,
though the language itself has changed a lot since then).
Irina
--
irina@valdyas.org www.valdyas.org/irina
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