Re: Obscenities

Dan Sulani wrote:

> 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.
That's correct.  But note the distinction between brackets [] and solidi //:
the former denotes phonetic notations, while the latter denotes phonemic
notations.   In German, there is one phoneme /x/, which has two allophones:
[x] (the ach-laut) and [ç] (the ich-laut).

(it's significantly more complicated than this, and I'm not sure about the
details)

> 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.
I don't know much about Hebrew, but from what you're describing, that's
because they are the same *phonetically*.  The other variant in German,
the ich-laut, is merely an allophone of /x/.  You can't compare phonemes
between languages, because phonemes are language-dependent.  Phones,
on the other hand, are merely acoustic measurements, and so can be compared
with any language (or sound for that matter).

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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