No pain, no g ähn?

[Lynne Miles-Morillo]

I can hear how gähn and can could rhyme to a German ear.  I, too, learned
intially that gähnen sounds like dehnen or zehn or other /e/ vowels, but
many Germans actually pronounce that ä more openly & more toward the center,
closer but not quite all the way to /3/ (see that symbol flipped for the
open-mid short-e vowel, please; can't get the curly e on this system) than
to the /e/ vowel.
In fact, if you listen closely to some speakers of German (and is more true
some dialects than others, but my mental map isn't coming up with *whose*
dialect this is), their /ae/ sound in English words (such as can) is a vowel
that's a little higher than in the speech of many native speakers of
English, a little closer to the /3/ sound.  In other words, for those
speakers, gähn *does* rhyme with can!

Great observation; thanks for the forward to the original poster.

Lynne MM

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      =?ISO-8859-1?B?UmU6IE5vIHBhaW4sIG5vIGfkaG4/?=
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I agree, Joel. But Chris will undoubtedly straighten us out.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      =?iso-8859-1?Q?No_pain,_no_g=E4hn=3F?=
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >  From an article in The New York Times today on
> > the debate duet of Merkel and Steinmeyer:
> >
> > "The front page of Bild, the country's largest
> > newspaper and a tabloid not known for its
> > subtlety, rhymed the famous Obama slogan with the
> > words "Yes we gähn," which means "yawn."
> >
> > Do Germans really rhyme this with "Yes we
> > can"?  When I was in high school, I would have
> > pronounced "gähn" more like the English
> > "Cain."  (I hear three vowels, "can," "con"
> > (which I would associate with the umlautless
> > German, e.g. in "Hahn"), and "Cain".  I don't hear "gähn" as "can.")
> >
> > Joel
> >
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>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
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