Omniscience

[Christian Weisgerber]

Leo A. Connolly <connolly at memphis.edu> wrote:

> 2.  Many millions of German speakers realize /v/ (written <w> or, in
> foreign words,
> <v>) as a voiced bilabial fricative.  These speakers then lack the
> voiced labiodental fricative, even though they have a voiceless
> labiodental /f/ written <f> or <v>.  I know of no German speakers who
> realize German /v/ as [w], or who have a prevocalic [w] of any sort in
> their language.

> 3.  Germans who possess [v] can, of course, handle initial English /v/
> just fine with no special effort.  Those who use the bilabial fricative
> cannot.  And neither group does well with English /w/; without extensive
> practice, they produce [v] or the bilabial fricative for that one too.

I would like to add some personal facts to the debate:

(a) When speaking English, I also suffer from substituting /w/ for /v/
    at least sometimes.  People have made fun of me about this and
    pointed out that I was saying e.g. "wideo" instead of "video".

(b) I do NOT realize /v/ as a bilabial in my native German, I use
    plain [v].

(c) Although [w] doesn't exist in my native speech, I think I've learned
    it without much trouble.  I have no problem distinguishing /v/ and
    /w/ in English.

So how come I end up with confusing /w/ and /v/ in my pronunciation?
(Nobody has ever told me that I substitute /v/ for /w/, but I suppose
it happens, too.)

There are many Germanic cognate words that have /v/ in German and
/w/ in English, e.g. the question words/relative pronouns and various
words such as, well, "word", "water", etc.  I suspect this leads
straightforward to overcompensation.  On the other hand, there are
many Latin-derived cognates that have /v/ in both languages.  If a
single phoneme must be mapped to two different phonemes in cognate
words, it shouldn't come as a surprise that much confusion results.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de