Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> Henrik Theiling skrev:
>
> >>(I believe German has a near-obligatory glottal stop before
> >>word-initial -- possibly even morpheme-initial -- vowels, so I have
> >>the same tendency.)
>
> I remember my mother, who is a German L1 speaker, correcting
> me when I pronounced the word _Verein_, which I had only
> encountered in writing, as [fe'rain], insisting that it
> be [fe6'?ain]!
>
> Since _ein_ is a stem, I think your rule holds, except
> that it should be "stem-initial and word initial":
> surely a prefix like _un-_ is pronounced [?un]!

Right, I had missed that.  Even more, prefixes starting in vowels will
always have a glottal stop in front (I think), even if you stack them:

   uneinsichtig
   un-ein-sicht-ig
   ['?Un?aI)n,zICtIC]

So probably it's stem and prefix initially where glottal stops are
mandatory.

> My other, and hence I, has a strange feature in her German
> pronunciation: she vocalizes /r/ to [6] in spite of the fact that
> her unvocalized /r/ is apical [r] or rather [4]!

I don't think this is a common combination in any dialect, but I don't
know whether I would have noticed.  From the description, I'd say the
combination is uncommon, but I would have to hear it.

>...
> On the subject of "hard" phones the diphthongs arising in German
> from short vowel + vocalized /r/ are hard to me in spite of my
> almost L1 pronunciation (German being my L1.5! :-).
>...

Yeah, I can understand they must be hard for some people -- I find
uncommon diphthongs hard myself.

> I tend to merge them all as something like [3(:)] or even [E(:)].
> Is this something I've invented myself, or is it a feature of Berlin
> accent, which influenced me quite a lot when I learnt German as a
> kid?  N.B. this does *not* happen when the underlying vowel is long:
> _Firma_ is ['f3ma] for me but _Vier_ is [fi6] or even [fi:6].  ...

Well, the short /i/, which is [I] for most (and in the standard) is
[1] in the diphthong /ir)/ for many Germans.  So you get a typical
['f16)ma] in many natives' pronunciation.  I find this very close to
[3], actually.

My own local variant of High German (Eastern Westphalian) has
simplifications in these /r/-diphthongs: I collapse all short and long
diphthongs in -[6], often with quality shifts of the first vowel and I
do not distinguish /a(:)r/ from /a:/.  Here's my table:

   /ir/ = /i:r/ =         [i:6)]
   /yr/ = /y:r/ =         [y:6)]
   /Er/ = /e:r/ = /E:6/ = [E:6)]
   /2r/ = /2:r/ =         [9:6)]
   /ar/ = /a:r/ = /a:/  = [a:]
   /or/ = /o:r/ =         [O:6)]
   /ur/ = /u:r/ =         [u:6)]

**Henrik