Re: Furrin phones in my own lect! (YAGPT warning!)

On 3/27/06, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> Henrik Theiling skrev:
>
> >>(I believe German has a near-obligatory glottal stop before
> >>word-initial -- possibly even morpheme-initial -- vowels, so I have
> >>the same tendency.)
>
> I remember my mother, who is a German L1 speaker, correcting
> me when I pronounced the word _Verein_, which I had only
> encountered in writing, as [fe'rain], insisting that it
> be [fe6'?ain]!
>
> Since _ein_ is a stem, I think your rule holds, except
> that it should be "stem-initial and word initial":
> surely a prefix like _un-_ is pronounced [?un]!
Though not all native speakers "obey" this rule -- case in point is
the pronunciation of "erinnern", which is [?E6'?In6n] for me but
[?E'RIn6n] for some (which sounds wrong to me).

BTW, I used to think that the vocalised /r/ was [a], not [6], until I
met an American who apparently pronounced [a] in such cases, and it
sounded distinctly odd -- the vowel sound was simply wrong.

Since them, I've become convinced that [6] is a separate phone from
[a] in German.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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