Re: German affricates (was: affricates/grammar help/intransitivity/free word order)

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 08:29:39 +0100, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
> wrote:
>
> >> Incidentally, what's with the extreme poverty of
> >> initial [x] in standard German? The only word I can
> >> think of is 'Chaos', which can either be [xa.os] or
> >> [ka.os], the latter pronunciation seeming to be the
> >> more common.
> >
> >TTBOMK, [k] is the only "correct" pronunciation in Standard German. I
> >believe that Swiss German has word-initial [x], though. (OTOH,
> >"Chemie" and "China" have [C] by standard German standards, though
> >some pronounce them with [k] -- and others with [S].)
> >
> >I think "Chuzpe" (chutzpah) has [x], but that's a loanword.
>
> I thought the prescriptive standard varied between /k/ before back vowels
> (and /a/) and /C/ before front vowels, with /x/ in a few loans.
FWIW, what they teach us poor furriners is /k/ before back vowels (incl /a/),
/C/ before back ones, except in French loans and the like where it's /S/ (like
in, eg, _Chance_). I suppose I *would* pronounce a word like _Chan_ with [x-],
but that's got more to do with a vague awareness of Mongolian than with
anything I've learnt in German class (Duden gives both [xa:n] and [ka:n], and
seems to prefer the spelling |Khan|, which IMVLE is less common).

And then there is Chemnitz, which is just evil.

                                                      Andreas