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

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 22:32:00 -0000, Christian Thalmann
<cinga@...> wrote:

>--- 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.
This is typical for both Swiss dialect and Swiss standard German.
Likewise, the affirmation that standard German merges these two isn't
true for all varieties of standard German. I don't accept that
northern Germany standard German would be more standard than Swiss
standard German or any other standard German.

>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.
>
>Is this a personal, regional or national idiolect, or does it
>apply to all of the German language domain?  How come the
>dictionaries pretend it not to exist?  Is this even a case of
>Frenchesque linguistic prescriptivism?  ;o)
I fear it's like this, or Anglesque. I mean: The fortis-lenis
distinction in the main IPA languages French and English is commonly
said to be a voiceless-voiced opposition. The terms fortis and lenis,
as I know them, aren't used as alternatives to voiced-unvoiced, but
as more general terms: They describe what distinguishes [p, t, k]
etc. from [b, d, g] etc. The distinction varies from language to
language. It can be based on any of the features voice, aspiration,
length, or force, or on any combination of them.

The distinction you've descibed is regional: Southern German
(including, of course, Swiss German) doesn't have voiced stops. Like
this, the fortis-lenis opposition in standard German relies after all
on aspiration, since this is the only feature found as well in
northern as in southern standard German (else, we'd have to describe
southern and northern standard German as having different stop
inventories). Alemannic dialects, at least, don't have aspirated
stops either; so the feature that distinguishes Alemannic fortis from
lenis is mainly length.

The lenition of medial fortis is another phenomena, occuring in many
regions after all of middle Germany. It eliminates the fortis-lenis
opposition. (It's similar to the tapping of /t/ and /d/ in many parts
of the U.S.)

FWIK, the Swiss/Alemannic opposition of fortis and lenis is the same
as in Finnish, even though the Alemannic opposition is represented as
[d_0] vs. [t(:)], whereas the Finnish isn't called a fortis-lenis
opposition and is represented as [t] vs. [t:]. So here's again two
transcriptions for one and the same sound (Finnish [t] vs. Alemannic
[d_0]), which is only due to Alemannic being a dialect of German and
German northern pronunciation with voice contrast being considered
'more standard' than German southern pronunciation. This is yet
another instance of language specific phonetic (not phonemic)
transcription. And since I've found already three such examples in
one single day, I suspect that there are much more of them, which
means that phonetic description is language specific, even though it
shouldn't be.

kry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

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