USAGE: YAGPT: Re: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 18:10:38 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

>Hi!
>
>Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> writes:
>> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@A...> wrote:
>>...
>> > Strange? It's a normal Langenscheidt dictionary. It also includes
>> > the Ipa pronunciation at the beginning.
>>
>> Aren't the Langenscheidts made for Germans who learn other
>> languages?  I doubt they would invest much effort in the
>> notation of German pronunciation.
They're also made for foreigners who learn German, so I'd think they care
more for pronunciation than other dictionaries.

>Furthermore, the Langenscheid Englisch-Deutsch-Deutsch-Englisch
>dictionary I just checked, which indeed includes the pronunciation for
>that word, shows ['Erg@r] as we both suggested.
>
>(The wrong thing with that is the usage of [] instead of //, since
>that's the phoneme string.  The realisation of that is ['?E6g6].)
That's only one of the possible realisations. The Swiss standard German
would rather be ['Erg_0@r] (without glottal stop). My own pronunciation is
approximately ['?ERg6].

Some decades ago, in the schools of the canton of Berne (Switzerland) they
teached to pronounce any written |ä| as [&_o], so it would have been
['z_0E_rtsE_r] |setze| vs. ['z_0&_otsE_r] |Sätze|. Among the older
generations, this is still heard, that is, after all among conservative
politicians (national politics is one of the very few places where standard
German is spoken, because of the Romance minorities). So there was at least
one variety of standard German that had a very audible distinction between
short |e| and |ä|.

I don't doubt that there are other varieties of standard German that make a
similar distinction as well - but the prescriptive standard doesn't.

g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust