--- Christophe Grandsire skrzypszy:
>If Zeelands is not too far from Brabants, I'd expect it to round a bit and
>maybe go a bit lower. In Brabants the diphtongue is tortured to
>death :)) .
One of the very few things I know about Zeelands is that it is quite
different from all surrounding dialects, including Brabants.
>>At risk of getting into a renewed discussion with Christophe about this
>>matter, I'd venture [v]. After <u> (especially in word-final positions,
>>like "lauw", "nieuw", etc.) it is pronounced [w].
>
>I hear quite often [v\], especially in Southern dialects.
Hehe. See? ;))
>Yep. Luckily, Unicode includes the IJ as a single character :) . And I'm
>personally using mostly TeX which has it also :)) .
I must admit that I have gotten completely used to writing them separately,
to a point even that a digraph would look strange to me.
But I would néver éver make the mistake of capitalising only the "I"!!!
>As Jan said, [S] and [Z] are not phonemic in Dutch (the only place they
>reliably appear is when /s/ and /z/ are palatalised by a following /j/ -
>as in "meisje" :)) -).
Yes. The classical example BTW is "sjouwen" (often used in travellers'
phrase books to describe the [S] sound in English, French or German).
I should add that many "strange" sounds appear when followed by /j/. For
example, a word like "hertje" can often be heard as [hErC@] or [hErc@], but
also [hErt_s`@], etc.
>So /s/ and /z/ seem to wander around a lot more than in
>languages where the opposition is phonemic :)) .
Indeed!
>You've never heard Brabants then! :))) And I've heard some Flemish
>dialects going much further than that (one Belgian guy I saw a few days
>ago had [e] for /I/ and [i] for /e/. Not easy to follow :)) ).
Wow! That must be weird!
>>Well, they definitely called Dutch _Hollands_.
>
>Are there any Zeeland separatists? ;)))
Not AFAIK.
>Of course, dialects are free to do whatever they want :)) . But I stay by
>the claim that the standard (as I was taught it by someone who had a pure
>[v] for "w") has [v\], and a three-way distinction among the
>labiodentals :)) .
Well, what can I say to avoid repeating old discussions...? ;)))
>>Well, an alveolar sound is inheritly better to a velar one IMHO :)
>
>Well, I have to disagree. I'm in love with the voiced velar fricative of
>Brabants and Flemish :))) .
Yes, but that one is for /g/ and not for /r/, right?
Jan