Re: Chinese Dialect Question

At 04:16 PM 10/4/03 -0400, you wrote:
>Isidora Zamora scripsit:
>
> > Which potato?  The one's that Danes invariably keep in their mouths when
> > speaking :-)
>
>That would be the one.  When I (mis)translated "Copenhagen" as
>"Cheapinghaven", Lars Mathiesen corrected it to "Cheapmanhaven"; I
>apologized that I hadn't been able to hear the "mann" morpheme through
>the potato.
ROTFLOL.  That's wonderful!  Although it's a bit odd, because I've lived in
the area, and the place is anything but cheap to live in :-)

Until your ear becomes accustomed to it, it can be difficult to hear
*anything* through the potato, and I couldn't hear the "mand" morpheme
until the origin of the name was explained to me.

Then there's the problem of acquiring your very own potato and learing to
speak around it.  I knew from the start that someone was eventually going
to ask me to say "rød grød med fløde," which is a very mushy mouthful for
foreigners, (as well as being a very delicious desert), so I got my
host-brother to coach me on pronunciation.  By the time school started, I
could do a fair  job of it, and it paid off.  The first time someone asked
me to say it, I shot back with the phrase, and the boy who had asked me was
rather embarrased.

> > Can you explain the "over-voiced" and "over-fortis" business to me?  I
> > learned Danish before I was a lingust.
>
>In other words, pronouncing [b_0] as [b] is more voicing than is wanted,
>but doesn't collide with any other phoneme.  Similarly, pronouncing
>[t_0_h] is more fortis than it should be.
How is [t_0_h] more fortis than it should be?  As far as I have been able
to observe, Danish voiceless stops are supposed to be quite heavily
aspiriated.  (It's also quite possible that I don't properly understand the
meaning of the term "fortis.")

Isidora

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