Re: Danish d

At 12:16 7.4.2003 +0000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:

> > Never mind. I was hearing it wrong. I asked her to say it more
> > slowly in it's pronounced /D/.
>
>There was a longer discussion of Danish "soft d" on the list a few
>months back, but the upshot is that it's an (non-sibilant) alveolar
>voiced fricative. [D_-] in X-SAMPA, in the IPA proper an edh with an
>underbar (diacritic for "retracted").
>
>Most Danes won't notice if you use a dental voiced fricative instead.
>
>Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)
Nowadays I use the Icelandic [z_m] (sibilant laminal alveolar) when
speaking both
English and (my mangling of) Danish, and nobody seems to notice.

I also use the corresponding [s_m] for English /T/.  The Icelandic
pronunciation
got totally ingrained during my year on Iceland, and I seem unable to
produce an
(inter)dental without exceptional effort anymore.  Since Swedish coronals
(at least in my lect) are normally laminal postdental anuway it is actually
the
purely apicoalveolar sounds which are hard to acquire.  Our /s/ would sound
like
halfway between the English /s/ and /T/.

On Iceland I met a Frenchman who used his French [R\] (rolled!) for
Icelandic [G],
his /S/ for Icelandic /s/, French /Z/ for Icel. /r/, French /s/ for Icel.
[s_m] /T/
and finally French /z/ for the voiced allophone of that fricative.  The
funny thing
is that it took only a few minutes to get totally used to those substitutions!
Apparently they didn't seem to bother the native Icelanders a lot either.

/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)
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