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

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]!

My other, and hence I, has a strange feature in her
German pronunciation: she vocalizes /r/ to [6] in
spite of the fact that her unvocalized /r/ is apical
[r] or rather [4]!  I suspect this is ulimately
influence from her parents' L1s (Ukrainian and
Polish), which both have [r] but no [R], or are
there German accents that genuinely has this strange
realization?  Strangely my aunt, who also has lived
in Sweden for 45 years (after 27 years in Germany, 23
years in Germany, 45 in Sweden for my mother) has [R]
in her German, and even in her Swedish!

On the subject of "hard" phones the diphthongs arising
in German from short vowel + vocalized /r/ are hard to
me in spite of my almost L1 pronunciation (German being
my L1.5! :-).  I tend to merge them all as something
like [3(:)] or even [E(:)].  Is this something I've
invented myself, or is it a feature of Berlin accent,
which influenced me quite a lot when I learnt German
as a kid?  N.B. this does *not* happen when the underlying
vowel is long: _Firma_ is ['f3ma] for me but _Vier_
is [fi6] or even [fi:6].  Truly wierd!  FYI my
English is rhotic; I learnt it mostly from my
paternal grandmother who had lived in Chicago for
twelve years.  I wonder if my English still has
features of 1920's Chicago accent!?

On the theme of furrin phones I had a university
teacher who like many people from North and Middle(1)
Sweden had /x/ merged into /s`/ with the strange
result that she pronounced [s`] for [x] in foreign
words, even in words from languages like German and
Hebrew which properly have an /S/ vs. /x/ contrast.
(The subject was history of religion, hence the
Hebrew words!)

When I learnt Icelandic I first had grave problems
with /G/, which I pronounced [g], until someone
pointed out that [R], which I could pronounce,
was a much better approximation.  Then I met this
Frenchman, a scholar of Old Norse, who consistently
had the following substitutions:
/G/ -> [R]
/r/ -> [Z]
/s/ -> [S]
/D/ -> [z]
/T/ -> [s]
Strangely he was intelligible after a few minutes,
although we soon switched to English!
This worked in spite of the fact that Icelandic has
a marginal distinction between /rs/ [s`], /sj/ [s\]
and /s/ [s].  In fact even some Icelanders have [S]
for /s/ (and [rS] for /rs/), though that is considered
a speech defect.

Both when speaking Icelandic and when I try to
affect Danish or Finnish I tend to use *voiced*
stops instead of voiceless unaspirated stops,
or at most voiceless lenes.  Strangely this seems
acceptable to L1 speakers: more acceptable than
excessive aspiration in Icelandic and Danish,
and Finns tend to hear even ungeminated aspirated
stops as their geminated unaspirated stops, while
they hear even geminated voiced stops as their
ungeminated voiceless stops.  Strange but convenient
for a Swedish L1 speaker!

Furrin phones in my own lect: Swedish uses clicks
as interjections and calls to horses -- like other
Germanic langs AFAIK --, but strangely that doesn't
make it easier to say them in words like _Xhosa_!

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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