Re: Danish was:Re: NATLANG ruki-rule in Slavic

At 09:07 PM 8/18/03 +0200, you wrote:
>I can't get past the impression that Danes on average articulate less clearly
>than do Swedes and Norwegians. I'm told there's phonetic evidence of this.
>What I'm refering to as laxness isn't the lenitions - it's a
>general "fuzziness", which affects the vowels as much as the consonants. It's
>was gets Danish parodyized as [E:@2:@E:@:E].
>
>                                                        Andreas
I've always felt that Danish has a very "blurry" sound to it.

Also, there's something going on with a number of the vowels (at least in
koebenhavnsk, which is all that I really know) such that they are
glottalized or something, giving them an odd, somewhat grating quality.  I
can reproduce the effect in words such as gaette "guess", but I can't
precisely say what I am doing, except to say that it feels "glottalized."

I just tried listening to myself say, "Det er noget jeg godt vil vide."  I
noticed several things about the vowels.  The first tow vowels combine
together, but I don't think you can help that.  The e in noget is very
definately a schwa.  Jeg sounds a lot like English "yah".  The vowel in vil
is very short and lax.  The i in vide is nearly a barred i, and the final
vowel would certainly be a schwa if it were there at all.  I'm no native
speaker, but my pronunciation is decent.  There is something indistinct
about the vowel quality in Danish.  It probably does give headaches to
speakers of other Scandinavian languages.

Isidora

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