Re: Leute (was...)

>Mark J. Reed wrote:
>>  On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:47:15AM -0700, Philippe Caquant wrote:
>>
>>>I may be wrong, but it seems to me that in Alsace
>>>(Elsass), "Leute" is pronounced more or less like
>>>"Litt" ? Could you confirm ?
>>
>>
>>  I can neither confirm nor deny, but I'd find that odd . . . I know
>>  German dialects are all over the map, and Swiss German is Just Plain
>>  Weird, but /'loj.t@/ becoming /lIt/ seems a bit extreme.
>>
>>  -Marcos
>
>But it isn't /'loi.te/ that becomes /lIt/ rather the form which
>[loe.t@] *developed from* became [lIt], which is a different thing.
'Litt' corresponds to Middle High German (which was mostly based on
Alemannic  and Swabian dialects) 'liut(e)', which was pronounced [ly:t(@)].
Many Swiss German dialects still have the same form (and as Philip Newton's
pointed out, similar forms are found in Plattdütsch). In Basel, the Swiss
region next to the Alsace, there's also unrounding of front vowels, and
people from Basel have told me that the dialect spoken in the Alsace is very
similar to the one of Basel.

I'm not quite sure whether the actual standard form developed from that very
form, since the modern standard is mainly based on dialects of Saxony and
Austria.

g_0ry@_–s:
j. 'mach' wust

Reply