Re: CHAT letter names (was: CHAT Etruscana etc)

Hi!

John Cowan wrote:

> People will do very odd things in the name of disambiguation. The
> names of the German vowels are their "long" sounds, as in English,
> but the name of "ä" is [&:] even though [e] is the normal "long"
> pronunciation, because of course [e] is used as the name of "e".
But that is not so.  German 'ä' has the name [?E:] and is pronounced
[E:] or [E] depending on whether it is long or short.

And, yes, German 'e' has the name [?e:] and is pronounced [e:] (when
long), [E] (when short) or [@] (in many unstressed situations).

So there is no breaking the rule that the long version serves as the
name of the vowel.

It is true that some younger people speaking certain, often northern,
dialects often pronounce 'ä' as [e:] nowadays, but that's (still)
dialectal and will not occur in all situations.  E.g. in the
conditional, most of these dialects do not tolerate the 'lazy'
pronunciation.  E.g.:

   maybe 'Käse' = [ke:z@] (yuk!)  standard would still be [kE:z@]
   but   'gäbe' = [gE:b@]
    !=   'gebe' = [ge:b@]

Let's wait another 50 years, maybe you will be right by then. :-)

Bye,
  Henrik

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