Re: USAGE: rhotics (was: Advanced English + Babel text)

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 07:18:50 +0100, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

>On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 18:17:03 +0100, Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:
>>  --- "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@...> [r\VUt_?]:
>> > If someone here in Germany wants to imitate a French
>> > dialect, he'll most notably omit the initial "h"
>> > sound (e.g. turning "hotel" into "otel"), and
>> > pronounce the German "ch" as "sh".
>>
>> Is [x] turned to [S] _all_ the time
>
>ITYM "Is /x/ turned to [S] all the time"; in my opinion, you don't
>have [x]'s that sometimes turn into [C]'s (does that even make sense?)
>but rather /x/'s that are realised as [x] or [C] depending on the
>environment. (If, indeed, they are one phoneme, which is, I believe,
>still a question debated by Germanists.)
[C] and [x] are two clearly distinct sounds, even though they are both
written "ch", and exchanging one for the other would sound *really* awkward...

>> or only when it appears palatalized as [C]?
>
>I'd say that this is the case -- i.e. [C] -> [S] but not [x] -> [S].
>Not sure what becomes of [x]; I'd be inclined to say that it remains
>[x] in a mock French accent.
I'd rather say that both are turned into [s] since neither [C] nor [x]
actually exist in French.

>The accent/rhythm/melody also changes, though that's more difficult to notate.
>
>> As a native speaker of
>> English, I sometimes catch myself doing the same
>> thing; i.e., I'd pronounce /machen/ pretty much
>> perfectly, as ["ma.xn=], but I'd realize the phrase
>> /ich dächte/ as [IS."dES.t@].
>
>Interesting, especially since [C] occurs in my lect of English, as an
>allophone of /hj/ (probably via something like [hj] > [h_j] > [C]) --
>for example, in |huge|, roughly [Cu:dZ].
Most English speakers I've witnessed this far don't make a distinction
between [hj] and [C], so it seems to be quite common.

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of Choton
official Choton homepage:
http://www.choton.org