Fricatives (was Re: Hda / Sna)

[ROOD DAVID S]

That's certainly not standard German pronunciation!  For stage German and
for the broadcast media, [g] between vowels is as much a voiced stop as it
is in English.  Only in the far south is orthographic "g" a fricative; in
the northwest and in Berlin, it's usually become "y"  (English y, IPA
[j]). But either of those pronunciations will brand you as poorly educated
anywhere outside the area where they're used regularly.

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Rory M Larson wrote:
> > In teach-yourself language books, the example I've seen most
> > often is German "sagen".  (Accent on first syllable, pronounce
> > 's' as [z], 'a' as [a], 'e' as schwa, 'n' as [n], and go into
> > doing the 'g' in the middle as [g], except don't quite hit it.
> > This produces a sound somewhere between [g] and [y].  English
> > "say" is the same word; we took it all the way to [y].)
>
> In Old English it is written s<ae>g (<ae> = aesc, the ae digraph), but
> they usually put a dot over the g in modern student editions to remind you
> to pronounce it y.  There's a long tradition among languages scholars of
> putting dots under and over things.
>
> JEK
>