Re: Rare phonemes (was Re: Using word generators)

On 1/15/07, Jonathan Knibb <jonathan_knibb@...> wrote:
> I wrote:
> > maybe German /tS/
> > in 'Deutsch' is sufficiently unusual in the rest of the
> > lexicon to count [as an example of a very rare phoneme]
>
> and Carsten wrote:
> > Some more words with /tS/: Quatsch, Tschüss, Matsch,
> > Ratsche; futsch; patschen, lutschen...
NB a number of those sound colloquial and/or onomatopoetic to me; I'd
say the sound is moderately rare in "proper" German words.

> Off-topic, and at the risk of waking an old controversy about the
> phonemic status of affricates, do you (calling all native German
> speakers) feel that the last of these is /lU.tS@n/ or /lUt.S@n/? It
> makes a major timing difference in my variety of English (pardon the
> example, but "catch it" has a much briefer closure than "cat shit"), I
> don't know whether the same is true for German.
Phonemically, I'd be inclined to analyse it as /lU.tS@n/.

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

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