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

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 16:47:36 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>> 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_).
Sure, I forgot about that one. Foreigners who have explicitly learnt it know
such things better than native speakers who only know it implicitly.

===============================

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 20:49:00 +0100, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

>Incidentally, since you wrote /C/ and /x/, I presume you consider them
>separate phonemes? Or did you mean to write [C] and [x]?
I actually wrote /k/ because I didn't want to write [k_h], and then went on
without thinking. All cases of [C] pronunciation can be explained if we
assume that the syllable break is known previously, but I don't know whether
I want to make that assumption.


>> 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.
That's what I think, too.


>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..
I knew about the lengthening _e_ in names like Soest or Kues, but cases like
_Troisdorf_ are new to me! Well there's _Duisburg_ which I think is
pronounced as /dy:sbUrk/, but that's somewhat different.

The one such evil spelling I know is _gg_ in cases like _Toggenburg_ or
_Jäggi_ or _Schwarzenegger_ which are not pronounced as /g/ (not
*/'tOg@n"bURk/ or */'jEgi/, though /'Svarts@"nEg@r/ already has become
common), but as /k/, that is, /'tOk@n"bUrk/, /'jEki/, and /'Svarts@"nEk@r/
(properly without aspiration, but that's difficult for most speakers of
standard German, and it's not necessary either).

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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