LL-L "Language studies" 2008.07.01 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 01 July 2008 - Volume 04
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From: Ivison dos Passos Martins <ipm7d at OI.COM.BR>
Subject: vowel sounds

Dear Lowlanders,

   Are the words for book and similar /oo/words in English  pronounced
the same way in all Lowlandic languages? In German and Dutch it is
pronounced like in English book, buch and boek share the /oo/ sound.
Is there any other language or dialect in which we may hear the long o
sound insted of that /u/ sound as in English?
   I remember hearing something like /bôk/ or /bouk/ for buch/boek I'm
not sure - 'ô / ou' sound as in 'old', from a friend of mine
who lived in the South part of Brazil, where there are many German and
Dutch colonies that have preserved their languages.
   Thanks,

    Ívison.

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From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Language studies" 2008.07.01 (03) [E]

Muito obrigado, Ivison e Reginaldinho,

I read that Leonese or Asturian or both (Northern Spanish coast) do have
neuter nouns, mostly mass nouns such as 'water', 'grain', 'sand', 'oil'
etc. and that there are seperate articles for neuter and masculine. I
think to remember that masculine articles/nouns end in -u, and neuter ones
in -o. The same thing occurs in a few Italian dialects, if I recall right.

About Danish (and Swedish and Norwegian) articles den, det, de preceding
adjectives before nouns, is there any evidence that this comes from
influence by Low Saxon? Because normally the articles are suffixes in the
North Germanic languages: -en, -et, -a etc.

Ingmar

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From: ipm7d at oi.com.br
Subject: LL-L "Language studies" 2008.07.01 (03) [E]

Dear Reinhard,
>

   Are the words for book and similar /oo/ pronounced the same way
in all Lowlandic languages? In German and Dutch it is pronounced like in
English.
Is there any other language or dialect in which we may hear the long o
sound insted
of that /u/ sound as in English?
   I remember hearing something like /bôk/ or /bouk/ for buch/boek I'm
not sure
 - 'ô / ou' sound as in 'old', from a friend of mine
who lived in the South part of Brazil, where there are many German and
Dutch colonies that have preserved their languages.
   Thanks,

    Ívison.

----------

From: Diederik Masure <didimasure at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language studies" 2008.07.01 (03) [E]

> From: Ivison dos Passos Martins
> Subject: Danish long vowels
>
> Hi everybody,
>
>   I've been studying Danish and I am a little bit confused. The IPA in
> the book says that long "o" /o:/ is pronounced like oo in English.
> However, I've seen some movies in Danish and I heard the long "o" as if it
> were a Spanish "o", not the oo sound as in English. A Norwegian friend of
> mine who lived here said that in Norwegian it raelly sounds like in
> English, but maybe in Danish they pronounce it another way.
>
>   So how should I say "bog" (book) in Danish? Should it be pronounced as
> in English or as in Spanish?

As far as I have 'bog' heard pronounced in Danish, I would write it
approximately as "bow" in English... that's the closest I can get to it
(with a more voiceless 'b', though).
But in general, long /o:/ (I think) is indeed pronounced more the
'continental' way, as opposed to Swedish/Norwegian which have [u:] (i.e.
[bu:k]).
In 'bog', the fricative /g/ is more or less vocalised to /w/, but in f.ex.
'rod' (root) its sound is similar to [Ro:D]. (Swedish/Norw. 'rot', [ru:t]).

Diederik

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language studies

Hi again, Ívison!

(1)

What is spelled "oo" is not pronounced uniformly in the various Lowlands
language varieties.

As you know, "oo" in English "book" and "took" is the same vowel sound as in
"put" (though there are some dialects in Britain that have a long [u:]
here).
In Low Saxon it represents a diphthong, as in English "broke".
In Dutch it represents a long [o:] in some dialects and a diphthong as in
English "broke" in other dialects.
In Afrikaans it represents a long [u:] sound followed by a short schwa
sound.

(2)

In order to put an end to (extraneous) questions about Danish phonology, let
me just explain that the Danish word *bog* 'book' is rather difficult to
pronounce, and you need to have a native speaker demonstrate it for you. In
the International Phonetic Alphabet it is written [bɔːˀʊ̯], in the SAMPA
system [bO:_?U_^]. It's a long open, lax "o" sound with creaky-voice-type
glottal contraction at the end of it, then followed by a "w"-type sound. I
suggest you get yourself a Danish textbook with CDs or cassettes.

This contraction thing, called *stød* in Danish, is a rarely occurring sound
among the world's languages. So far I know that similar sounds occur in
Latvian (*lauztā intonācija* 'broken intonation'), Livonian and Vietnamese (
*ngã*) as tones (pitch accents), in Livonian and Danish as remnants of old
tones.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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