Re: THEORY: YASPR -- Yet Another Swedish Pronunciation Rant (fuit: THEORY: NATLANGS: Phonology and Phonetics: Tetraphthongs, Triphthongs, Diphthongs)

Andreas Johansson skrev:
> Citerar Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:
>
>
>>I still don't think length is phonemic in Swedish
>
>
> And I still find analyzing vocalic length as subphonemic
> perverse.
Hey, 'perverse' is a value judgment...

> (The monthly instalment of "Andreas's reasons for phonemic
> vowel length in Swedish": if vocalic length is subphonemic,
> how am I supposed to account for the fact that _kvart_
> [kvat`] and _fart_ [fA:t`] don't rhyme?)
They don't rime because they _kvart_ is /kvartt/ and _fart_
is /fart/.  More precisely:

1) An rC cluster (other than /rr/) doesn't suffice to
make a preceeding vowel short.

2) There are rC_1C_1 (i.e. /r/ + geminate) clusters even
though the spelling system fails to distinguish them, and
those do cause shortening.  In fact r + geminate is more
frequent than r + single consonant.  It is well known to
Finnish speakers that Swedish speakers mispronounce words
like _Turku_ as _**Turkku_.  There are BTW rrC clusters
as well, though only in loanwords.

I readily admit that rC against rCC is most frequent with
r + coronal, and that's probably no accident, and that most
words with r + coronal geminate are loanwords, and that the
phenomenon of r + coronal being realized as postalveolars
probably has something to do with it, the [R] dialects
mostly having short vowels before all kinds of clusters.

Still the r+geminate analysis is more economical than the
vowel length analysis, since even if you claim that your
lect has no (surface) geminates vowel length is predictable
from consonantal structure in 90 per cent of all cases,
provided that one takes into account that:

1) Vowels can be long only in  syllables with primary or
secondary stress, and

2) Morpheme boundaries matter in length assignment, in that
a morpheme boundary between two consonants in a cluster
usually -- i.e. in most lects -- prevents shortening. That's
why you get [ku:kt] from _kok#t_ and [E:gde] from _äg#de_.
Notably geminates in many lects shorten preceding vowels
even if a boundary intervenes, thus [got:]/[gOt:] from
_got#t_.

> But to connect to what you said about the phantasmal nature of standard Swedish;
> we're arguing from 'lects that can't be reduced to a common phonology.
So you are saying that we speak different languages?
Interresting!

>>I must point out that there is nothing freakish about my
>>pronunciation: it is a quite normal West Coast
>>pronunciation, i.e. I hear this kind of pronunciation around
>>me every day, though of course most people are not aware of
>>the different allophones in their own speech.
>
>
> With such an open goal left before me, how can I fail to remark that West Coast
> pronunciations in general are freakish? :p
The point was that I'm not a *lone* freak.  Besides
non-distinction of long /e/ and /E/ sounds freakish
to me, so I guess everybody is someone else's freak!

>>>>and no true diphthongs -- e.g. |aj| being [Az\] as
>>>>often as not.
>>>
>>>
>>>I'm tempted to analyze Swedish Vj as diphthongs - partly because V:j is
>>>essentially absent - but I'm not gonna be obnoxious about it. I'm
>>
>>unrepentantly
>>
>>>obnoxious, however, about [au] in eg. _paus_ being a true diphthong!
>>
>>In a way it doesn't work for me, since my /j/ is normally [z\],
>>but OTOH [z\=:] *is* a perfectly possible realization of /i/
>>for me!  For _paus_ I have [pABs], but again I'm not sure that
>>I don't have [B=:] as a possible allegro realization of /8\/,
>>since non-instrumental analysis of one's own allegro speech
>>is inherently difficult!
>
>
> Despite the spelling, my Sprachgefuehl is quite clear that the second part of
> "au" is /u/, not /8/. In informal speech, I rhyme _paus_ and _kaos_ (the later
> being bisyllabic in formal speech: ['kA:.Os]~['kA:.Us]).
I don't say that the [B], or rather [B_o], in my [aB]
-- note it is a capital |b|, not an eight! --
realizes /8/; it might just as well realize /u/, or more
likely it is a position of neutralization.  _Paus_ and
_kaos_ are a perfect rime to me too.

> To a first approximation, written |au| is [au] in stressed position and [a] in
> unstressed position in my speech.
Well, I think that the most common words with 'unstressed |au|
-- _chaufför_ and _restaurang_ -- are simply 'misspelled': they
might as well be spelled with _å_ just like _fåtölj_; at least
in the case of _chaufför_ I think it is simply a case of the
word being adopted at a later time, and by people who harbored
secret aversions against Leopold's scheme for respelling of
French loanwords.  Both words definitely have /o/ for me.

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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