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

On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:25:01 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Quoting j_mach_wust <j_mach_wust@...>:
>
>> 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:].
>
>Hm. I hear Finnish 't' as /t/, not /d/, which I'd expect if it were a
>dental or alveolar voiceless non-aspirated lenis stop. I guess it might be
>not lenis enough.
What is a lenis? I don't know it for sure; I just know that the Swiss
German short voiceless stops are caled lenes, and these are identical with
Finnish /t, p, k/.

I've been told by Swiss people that the typical Finnish accent is
to 'weaken' all German /p, t, k/ as if they were /b, d, g/. The only way I
could explain this (and which makes perfectly sense to me) is that Finnish
speakers when speaking German (Swiss standard German) pronounce the German
<p, t, k> in the same way they are used to pronounce them in Finnish: like
Finnish /p, t, k/, the short voiceless stops of Finnish. Swiss people
perceive these sounds like the short voiceless stops of Swiss German, the
Swiss German lenes. The long voiceless stops of the two languages are
identical, too: /t:, p:, k:/. The only difference is that this opposition
between short and long voiceless stops is labelled _lenis-fortis_ in the
case of Swiss German, but in the case of Finnish not.

This difference in labelling the same phenomena has nothing to do with the
pronunciation, but rather with the tradition of phonetic analysis.

g_0ry@_^s: (= [kry@_^s:], but different from [k:ry@_^s:])
j. 'mach' wust

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