--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
>
>
> jouppe <jouppe@...> wrote:
> - - - - - - -
> In standard Swedish, which historically has done almost exactly
the
> same with phoneme length as Icelandic, the consonant length is
> usually explained as a function of vowel length and not vice versa
> (not my dialect by the way, which upholds a more archaic system
than
> Icelandic).
>
>
> What is your dialect? What country are you from? I don't recognize
the ".se" at the end of your e-mail address. At first I thought you
must be Swiss because of your name "Jouppe", but then I thought
Faeroese, then I thought dialectal Swedish --- ????
>
> Andrew
>
Finland Swedish. When I created my Yahoo account Finland was not on
the list, for whatever reason, so out of lazyness I picked Sweden.
Jouppe is pronounced [juppe] but Swedish spelling is ambiguous as
reagards this vowel so I use a French style digraph for that sound.
In my urban Helsingfors dialct I have a three way mimimal distiction:
<bara> (short syllable) adv. 'only' (cognate to <barely>)
<ba:ra> (long vowel) adj.'bare, exposed' pl. or strong declination
<barra> 'to drop needles' (what the x-mas tree does when it has dried)
<mina> (short syllable) 'my' plural
<mi:na> 'mine' (the one that explodes)
<minna> 'recall, remind oneself' (archaic) and/or female name
I also have clusters of different length:
<korsa> [korssa] 'to cross'
<Corsa> [korrsa] 'type of Opel/GM car'
In my urban dialect these lengths do not always ethymologically
correlate genetically to Old Swedish. But our capability to uphold
these length distinctions is due to influence from very archaic rural
Finland Swedish dialects, some of which represents the Old Norse/Old
Swedish length system very faithfully. Up on the west coast between
Vaasa and Kokkola there is a quite faithful representation of the
original four way distiction CVC(V) ; CVCC(V) ; CV:C(V) ; CV:CC(V).
I do not know of any other Germanic language that would uphold this
sort of thing.
Of course neighbouring Finnish also has a very length oriented
phonemic sytem. Maybe it is a bit of an areal phenomenon.