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

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.

(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?)

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.

> 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

> >>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]).

To a first approximation, written |au| is [au] in stressed position and [a] in
unstressed position in my speech.

                                                         Andreas

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