Re: Leute (was...)

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@Y...> wrote:

> I'm sorry, I should have mentioned it: It's the Swiss German dialect
> convention for the sound of [i] as opposed to <i> that represents
[I]. The
> same convention applies to many Swiss geographical and other names,
as the
> canton of Schwyz, or the Mythen mountains. That use of <y> isn't made by
> all, especially among the younger writers.
And especially by writers whose dialect doesn't distinguish
the two.  I personally only have one /i/ phoneme in my
lect.

In Bärndütsch, the distinction is clearly phonemic: |si|
"they" vs |sy| "to be".  The vowels |i e ä a| are all very
low [I E a A], so there is plenty of room left in the high
front area for another phoneme.

In my Züritüütsch, the same conceptual space is filled by
adding another "ä" phoneme rather than another "i".  I
clearly distinguish "ë" /E/ from "ä" /a/ and "e" /e/,
though I still haven't been able to make out a minimal
pair for this distinction.  The spelling of /E/ varies
greatly; many people write it as "ä" too, or sometimes as
"e".  The "official" spelling rules for Züritüütsch suggest
"è", but they also use "ì ò ù" etc for lowered versions of
those vowels, which I don't have in my lect.

I recently noticed that I have a /9/ phoneme.  /br2:tl@/
"to bake bread" and /br9:tl@/ "to roast" are a minimal pair
between /2/ and /9/.  I came to the conclusion that [9]
must be an allophone of /E/, since it's derived from
umlauted Germanic /a/, but to my chargin found a minimal
pair for those too: /krE:t/ "device" vs /kr9:t/ "fish
bones".

'Mach', how do you write /9/ in Swiss German?  Right now, I
use "ë", since [E] instead of [9] sounds less wrong to me
than [2] instead of [9].  I recently considered switching
to "æ" for /E/ and "œ" for /9/, but I'm not happy with the
resulting typographical look, especially when doubled (and
I do have phonemic vowel length in my lect).

[haS @ 'bess@ri i'de:]?



> So it'd be "['Sv\it:srdytS] not [Sv\i:tsrdy:tS]".
"Schwitzerdütsch"?  Eh bisch Yugo oder was?  ;-)  Though I
guess at the current levels of temperature and humidity we
can safely be called "Schwitzer".



-- Christian Thalmann

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