Re: Allophone Problem

Henrik wrote:
<<
Actually, I doubt there is, in the vast majority of German dialects,
any difference of final -/d/ and final -/t/.  My dialect for one, I am
sure, has a perfect merger.  If I don't know a spelling, it is
impossible for me to judge how to write that word without checking
related forms with a following vowel.
 >>

Well, that's exactly the thing, though.  They ran experiments
with people just like you who never doubted that the words
were identical, and they consistently were able to spot which
one ended in a voiced consonant and which one a voiceless
(they tested the results statistically, and all that).

Henrik:
<<
Are there any papers supporting you about this difference in German?
Analyses of recordings or something like that?
 >>

Quite a bit, actually.  William Labov is the most famous, probably.
I read a whole bunch of papers on near-mergers with my phonetics
advisor when I was doing my thesis on phonetics (because she
suspected there was a near-merger in my data.  Turns out, there
wasn't: just a full merger).  These papers are filed away somewhere,
but if I recall, it was a Labov paper that did a survey of a whole
bunch of them:

(1) German word-final devoicing
(2) Russian word-final devoicing
(3) Russian palatalization
(4) The infamous intervocalic [4] (tap) in English

And there was one other...  Probably the meet/meat one (where
the two, pronounced identically for most English speakers, split
in a particular dialect group in Great Britain, evidence that there
was, indeed, a near-merger, and not a full merger, between "meat"
and "meet" [otherwise the split would be impossible]).

Alan Yu cites some examples here:

http://64.233.179.104/scholar?
num=100&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=cache:nFiSnPxkTpwJ:trill.linguisti
cs.berkeley.edu/methods_conf/yu_abstract.pdf+near-merger+german
+devoicing

That Dinnsen paper rings a bell, as does Port.  Ooh, this looks
like an interesting paper:

http://www.sole.leidenuniv.nl/content_docs/ConsoleXIII2004pdfs/
ConsoleXIIIProceedings/console13-nycz.pdf

And something I was thinking about (that maybe the vowels
in "dog" and "father" really are different for many).  Unfortunately,
the paper's unreadable for me, pretty much, because the IPA
symbols don't come through...

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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