Re: USAGE: German VhC pronunciation

Mark J. Reed said:
> For her birthday my wife received a German card game called
> Drahtseilakt.  (We are of the opinion that the best board and
> card games come from Germany, and this one looks interesting
> so far.)  My question, however, is how to pronounce the name -
> specifically, the |h|.   Is it silent?
Yes.


> Is it pronounced as [h],
> which feels awkward, but not impossible, to my English-speaking tongue
> in that position?
No.


> Does it affect the preceding |a| somehow?
Depends on what you mean by "affect". 'Ah' is a digraph, so I guess you
can say that the 'h' "affects" the 'a'.

A form like 'Drat' would be pronounced the same as 'Draht' (with an /a:/),
so in that respect the 'h' doesn't literally affect the way the 'a' is
pronounced in this case.

(Note that using 'a' to represent /a:/ is relatively rare, and I don't
actually know of a form 'Drat'. 'Skat' and 'braten' (and its related
forms) are the only forms I can think of that have this orthograpy. I
think the digraph 'ah' must be the most common writing for /a:/ by far,
just sitting here thinking of examples. The digraph 'aa' occurs in
'Staat', but I can't think of more examples for that one either.)


-- Mark

P.S. I wonder if there's a downloadable German dictionary with enough
information to check out the kinds of idle intuitions I was indulging in
above.

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