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

From:Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 20, 2004, 18:49
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^) -- B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X) Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant! (Tacitus)