Re: Obscenities

On 31 Aug, Thomas Wier wrote:

>Matthew Kehrt wrote:
>
>> My mom, who speaks German, does not know of any differences between
>> the pronunciations of the final phonemes of 'doch' and 'ich', which
>> doesn't help.
Could be a matter of dialect. (There's the famous German
song "Muss i denn" where that dialect drops the /x/  at the end
of "ich" turning it into "i".)

>That's because they're not really phonemes.  The ich-lau occurs in an
>environment near a front vowel (/i I e E/), while the ach-laut occurs in
>exactly the opposite distribution, near back vowels (/u U o O a/).

I'm not an expert in German linguistics,  (note that, in my previous
posting, I didn't refer to /x/. I wasn't sure if I was talking about
allophones of /x/ in German or not.)  Anyhow, my German grammar
book, in the section on pronounciation, lists the [x] and the
"c with a tail" just like I wrote. I have also heard German spoken this
way. BTW, "c with a tail"  really does sound like a fricative (more
noise than "y" ).
    Also, with all due credit to the possibility of slight variations in
the production of /x/ between two langs, to my ears, the German
expression "ach" and the Hebrew aleph-chaf (= however) sound
 exactly the same.

Dan Sulani

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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.