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

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:47:15AM -0700, Philippe Caquant wrote:
>
>>I may be wrong, but it seems to me that in Alsace
>>(Elsass), "Leute" is pronounced more or less like
>>"Litt" ? Could you confirm ?
>
>
> I can neither confirm nor deny, but I'd find that odd . . . I know
> German dialects are all over the map, and Swiss German is Just Plain
> Weird, but /'loj.t@/ becoming /lIt/ seems a bit extreme.
>
> -Marcos
But it isn't /'loi.te/ that becomes /lIt/ rather the form which
[loe.t@] *developed from* became [lIt], which is a different thing.
I cant give any references off the top of my head, but I'm almost
certain that the Middle High German preform of /oi/ was /2H/.
It is not at all hard to imagine that this monophthongized to
something [Y]-ish which then unrounded.  NB that unrounding of
front rounded vowels is quite widespread in German dialects.


--

/BP 8^)
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B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)

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