Steven Williams wrote:
> Standard disclaimer: I am not a native speaker of
> German (my German works, and that's all I can say
> about it).
Moi aussi...
>
> So, in that case, I'd analyze the final affricate as a
> mere sequence of stop + fricative, on purely
> morphological grounds, although the phonological
> result would be exactly the same as some other
> hypothetical word in which the final -tsch was
> etymologically a single unit.
I'm not at all sure that forms exist in which "final -tsch [is]
> etymologically a single unit."
>
> But for the most part, I would transcribe words like
> 'lutschen' as ["lU.tSn=], not ["lUt.Sn=]. I can't
> really think of any examples of the phonemes [t] and
> [S] occuring across word boundaries, to provide
> minimal pairs along the lines of 'catch it / cat
> shit'. Anyone?
How about ...hat schon... 'has already...',
or ...hat schön(e)... 'has beautiful...'-- these could contrast with a
putative "hatschen" (if such a form exists) semi-comparable to the English
example.