Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

Quoting Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@M...> wrote:
>
> > The example given in my dictionary is the final sound of the German
> > words |Rat| and |Rad|.  Both are pronounced the same way, even though
> > /t/ and /d/ are separate phonemes in other environments.   So instead
> > of writing /Rat/ or /Rad/, either of which implies a distinction which
> > is not made, you can use archiphonetic notation, which normally involves
> > slashes around the symbol for one of the phonemes involved in the
> > merger: /Ra/t//
>
> I don't know how "real" Germans treat the subject, but I
> personally distinguish voiced and unvoiced stops even finally,
> and always find it strange when people claim such words to
> sound identical.
Like Philip Newton's, my experience is they do merge completely.

> While both might be pronounced voiceless in this position, I
> give the latter a longer and more intense closure (obstruction?
> intermission of airflow? I don't know the exact term here).  I
> believe this is called a fortis/lenis distinction.  It's the
> same thing that lets you distinguish "bead" from "beat" and
> "vein" from "feign" even when whispering.
In Swedish the voiceless~voiced contrast in final stops is really a fortis~lenis
one too, so if the varieties of German I heard did it, I should have no trouble
hearing it. I do not.

That refering to more-or-less standard German. I have heard a couple of speakers
who did appear to distinguish them. Couldn't say if the "voiced" finals were
just lenis or really voiced, tho.

                                                       Andreas