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

--- Jonathan Knibb <jonathan_knibb@...>
schrieb:

> 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.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a native speaker of
German (my German works, and that's all I can say
about it).

I have the distinct impression that the final -sch in
'Deutsch' is a worn-down form of the ending '-isch';
in fact, I'm fairly certain about that, since the Old
Germanic form was something like *theodiskaz or
something like that.

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.

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?




	
		
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