LL-L "Phonology" 2006.01.08 (05) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 08 January 2006 * Volume 05
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From: Roger Hondshoven <roger.hondshoven at pandora.be>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2006.01.08 (01) [E]

Hello Ben,

To begin with, I hope you won't mind if  I'm not going to make any
statements about German. I'll leave that to those people who are better
placed to describe the situation in German. Let's confine ourselves to
Dutch. I wanted to make a distinction between Dutch speakers in the
Netherlands, Dutch speakers in the Flemish part of Belgium and Francophone
Belgians who speak Dutch occasionally but nevertheless pretty fluently.
I'll try to answer your question in detail.
In Holland the distinction between f and v seems to disappear, which would
ultimately mean that both consonants will become one phoneme. (Nevertheless
I'd rather leave that judgement to the Dutch)
The Femish do not confound f and v: If someone were to substitute, after a
pause, one of those consonants for the other it would definitely sound
weird, un-Flemish, un-Dutch. Of course, as you may know, the v automatically
turns into an f in cases of assimilation, as for instance in "een feest
voor" (a party for), pronounced  /feestfoor/, "lees verder" (continue
reading), pronounced /leesferder/, "ik ben hees vandaag" (today I'm hoarse),
pronounced /heesfandaag/. This kind of assimilation is governed by what we
call "de sandhiregels" (the rules of sandhi). Do f and v constitute one
single phoneme? It looks like it. I can come up with only one pair of  two
otherwise identical words, where there is a phonemic opposition between  v
and f , viz. "vezel" (fibre) and " fezel" ( whisper). But, as I said in a
previous posting, phonetically seaking the difference, though clearly
recognizable, is rather minimal, as the voicing of v is not so strong. As I
see it, the difference, in this respect, between Dutch as spoken by people
in the Netherlands and the variety spoken by the Flemish is narrowing.
Francophone speakers of Dutch, on the other hand, clearly use considerable
more voicing for the consonants v, z, g (if they succed in pronouncing the
latter correctly at all). As can be expected, they very often do not apply
the rules of assimilation: e.g. "niet zo" is frequently pronounced as
/niedzo/. This is consistent with French pronunciation rules .
I hope I have been able to explain these rather complicated and puzzling
phenomena satisfactorily.

Best regards,

Roger Hondshoven

> From: Ben J. Bloomgren <godsquad at cox.net>
> Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2006.01.07 (04) [D/E]
>
> Roger,
>
> "No, right the opposite. The f and v are two distinct phonemes for
> Francophone people. They don't mistake one for the other. The phonemic
> differnce is between strong voicing and no voicing."
>
> So are you saying then that the Dutch speaker will, dialectal variants
> notwithstanding here, unify the /f/ and the /v/? Am I still missing
> something? How does this work in standard German?
>
> Ben 

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