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

For the voiced z,d and so on, I think that they are easily
distinguished
in the middle of words, while it is difficult or almost impossible to
distinguish
between voiced and unvoiced d,b at the beginning of words.
I also don't think this "rule" is valid for compounds.
However "z" at the beginning of words is definitly nothing which can
be called Austrian pronounciation.

Might it be that there are something like long and short diphtongs in
the AB dialects?
(Because we have a lot of new diphtongs resulting
from the transformation of "l" and "r" and nasal vowels and a nasalized
version of "j" and so on.)

The only example I can give is a short version of the [au] vs a long
nasalized version of it. The only minimal pair I can think of is

[hau] hau ! , [haou~] Hahn

Maybe there is also a tonal difference in it but I don't think it has
any phonemic
value.

What I meant with the [ei] diphtong was the diphtong which occurs in
words like "meing" , "gseing" , "reim" and so on which I think is
something
quite characteristic for the dialects spoken in Südburgendland and
which might be a reason more why they sound so strange to the
Viennesse people.

.

Quantcast