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

Quoting Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Trebor Jung <treborjung@F...> wrote:
> > Philippe wrote: "When I was learning German at school, we pronounced
> "eu" in
> > "Leute" like in French "oeil". Only later I discovered that many Germans
> > seemed to pronounced it a slightly different way, something between
> "oeil"
> > and "oy". But that never caused me the slightest problem."
> >
> > ??? I do not understand this. I'm not sure how to pronounce French
> <oei> -
> > don't think I've seen a French word with that trigraph. Or maybeI
> have? My
> > mind is probably asleep - it's the summer holidays... ;)
>
> "Oeil" is [9j].  I never quite noticed that French people
> use that for German "eu", but it makes sense.  That's going
> to make my fake French accent more convincing now.  =)
>
> The High German realization of the diphthong seems more like
> [OH] or [O9] to me.
Most of my books write [O2] - I've also seen [OY] and [Oy] (the last not being
meaningfully different from [OH], I guess).

My pronunciation is probably best indicated as [OH].

There might be some sense to the "oeil" pronunciation, tho' - I'm led to believe
that the traditional Prussian pronunciation is [@j]. Some Swedish names of North
German extraction, has [2j] for 'eu', supposedly deriving from this Prussian
pronunciation (Swedes tending to rephonematicize stressed, or half-stressed,
[@] as /2/).

                                                     Andreas

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