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

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 06:13:01 -0500, J. 'Mach' Wust
<j_mach_wust@...> wrote:
> 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 thought the prescriptive standard varied between /k/ before back vowels
> (and /a/) and /C/ before front vowels, with /x/ in a few loans.
That sounds about right. (The "[k] is the only correct pronunciation"
applied only to the word "Chaos" under discussion, not to all initial
|Ch-|.)

Incidentally, since you wrote /C/ and /x/, I presume you consider them
separate phonemes? Or did you mean to write [C] and [x]?


On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 16:47:36 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> 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).
I have the opposite impression; I can't remember seeing "Chan" in
German -- for example, the standard spelling for the well-known
historical figure is "Dschingis Khan", I'd say.

> And then there is Chemnitz, which is just evil.
[kEmnIts] -- yes. But then, eastern German has more than its share of
"strange" pronunciations. (For example, the common element -ow, which
is [o:], as in Buckow and Treptow; even when an ending is added, as in
Buckower, I believe the pronunciation is something like [bUk:o:6],
without a [w], let alone a [v].)

Then there are lengthening vowels as in Soest [zo:st] and Troisdorf
[tRo:sdO6f], which the naive foreigner (or even German from other
parts of the country!) might take to represent [z2:st]/[z9st] and
[tRoYsdO6f], respectively..

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!