Re: German r silent? (was: laryngals in german and vowel length)

On Sun, 14 May 2006, gunananda@xxxxxxxx wrote:

However until now I have not heard nor perceived anything like
[A6] and to my ears until now the words Oper and Opa , Staat
and Start sound exactly identical and I do not think that I make
a distinction between those words.

I do believe you immediately but one should not too easily regard two
sounds as the same phoneme just because some or even many speakers speak
them exactly the same. Another Austro-Bavarian example is the loss of
voiced [z]. I think hardly any speaker South of river Main speaks a voiced
[z] (except, of course, when deliberately attempting a standard
pronunciation) but many do still make a difference between "reisen" and
"reißen": they have two different voiceless consonants instead of a voiced
and a voiceless one. Many other speaker make no difference at all.

I also noticed that I can distuinguish between a diphtong [ei]
and [ai] while certain speakers especially from the western parts
of austria are not able to do so and a lot of other certain
diphtongs which do not occur in standard german.

You mean the diphthongs *written* as -ei- and -ai-? Even among those
written -ei-, there are two distinct diphthongs, and in many German
dialects the difference is made. The numbers 1, 2, 3 are pronounced
"oans", "zwoa", "drai" in (Western) Bavarian, "aans", "zwaa", drää" in
(Eastern) Austrian, "eis", zwei", drii" in Swiss, "eens", zwee", "drai" in
Upper Saxon and Berlinisch and so on. Just standard German makes no
difference between the diphthong of "eins" and "zwei" and the diphthong of
"drei". These are clearly distinct phonemes in all these dialects except
standard German (minimal pairs are "ich weiß" vs. "es ist weiß" or "ein
Mensch" vs. "er hält ein").

So the question of what sounds are the same (more precisely: are variants
within the same set of sounds that are meant as equal; in linguistic
jargon: are allophones of the same phoneme) is both highly dependent on
the exact variety of language you are talking about, and in the case of
languages having something like a standard pronunciation, even dependent
on versions of this standard. As an example for the latter situation, the
phonetic difference between "Rad" and "Rat" was abandoned in the Siebs
about 50 years ago, and as far as I assume, not because of language change
but only of a less precise record of phonetic differences some speakers
make while others don't.

--
Helmut Richter
.

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