Re: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 19:54:32 -0400, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...> wrote:
>Where have you grown up? Where do your parents come from? Do you only speak
>standard German or more colloquial varieties as well or even dialect? How
>would you describe (e.g. in a phonetic transcription) your pronunciations of
>the first vowel in |Sätze| and of the first vowel in |setze|? -- I'm asking
>because I'm interested in what other varieties of standard German
>distinguish these two vowels besides old fashioned Swiss standard German.
I grew up and am still living in the north-western part of Germany,
North-Rhine Westphalia, just like my parents. I exclusively speak standard
German, with very few colloquial forms. I don't speak any dialect because I
have never learned it - my parents exclusively spoke standard German to me
all the time because they thought if they spoke dialect to me, that I would
have problems with standard German later. I once found an "Asterix" comic
completely written in the local dialect and had some difficulties
understanding it...
All people I know and have ever talked to, like my colleagues at college
(who don't speak dialect either), make a clear distinction between 'ä' and
'e' as e.g. in "Sätze" and "setze". The "ä" is a clear and distinct "ä",
much more like the English /{/ than like "e". The "e" is clearly different
from the "ä" at all times.
If you look at the Ipa soundchart which provides audiofiles of the sounds,
provided by Peter Ladefoged from the Ucla Phonetics Lab:
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter1/vowels.html
The actual German "ä" sound is generally much closer to /{/ than to /E/. The
"e" is always /e/, or if short: /@/ (schwa), but NEVER /E/.
Thus, "e" and "ä" are always clearly different from each other.

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