>Jeans: "Tcheans", z is always pronounced /s/, pleasure: pleasher.
>>Etc. :)
>
>German replaces /d3/ with /Ä/ and /ž/ with /Å¡/.
Not only this. In German there are no /ž/ and /d3/. (These sounds
are exotic to any "Tsherman". :) This is why in Eastern provinces
there are names such as Schup(p)an, Zschup(p)an, Tschup(p)an = the
equivalents of Župan.)
>As I said above.
With the additional info that neither Low German speaking people
can utter final voiced BDG: always PTK. (Hence, spelling difficul-
ties as well; e.g. highly frequent confusion noun Tod and adj. tot;
seid "you are" (plural) and seit "since". /These two are ubiquitous
in German-speaking Internet forums./)
>Because North German Hochdeutsch never reached them. Blame the >Scheisspreissn.
But get this message (and then do your own empiric studies):
North German native-speakers have the same fonetic idiosynchrasies
(and difficulties). The only thing that they can render correctly,
when speaking Hochdeutsch is /z/ Sonne, sehr, Suppe, sagen
/zonn&, ze:&, zupp&, zag&n/. To an average Middle and High German
there is no /z/ there until you show him/her what the Duden
grammar says; then the effect is: "fallen aus allen Wolken". :)
>Your insight and personal experience in this area will be useful
>for you in imagining what happened linguistically when
>Proto-Hochdeutsch-speaking(?) Bastarnae arrived in Proto-
>Low-German-speaking Jastorf.
That'd be highly interesting. Unfortunately, written records are
of help only rarely - whenever some peculiarity is renderable in
written form. Otherwise, without a ... tape recorder, there's no
way! We can't know how the real pronunciation/quality of consonants
and vowel was. And I personally insist on that upon seeing what
gigantic phonetic differences there are between German and other
Germanic idioms (in Flanders/Netherland, Frisian isles, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, Island and the entire English-speaking world;
even betw. British English and American English the pronunciation
gap (in my own ears) are as wide as the distance between our
Milky Way and neighboring Andromeda :) BE being phon'ly way closer
to Dutch and Low German than is AE).
>Depending on one's purpose.
But many and various idiosyncrasies of today might be 500-1000-2000
years old. Only that nobody knows exactly which is which.
E.g. why and when became uvula-R so widely spread virtually in
all German dialects, and only in the extremities (Switzerland,
partially in Austria and Bavaria, and in the extreme North of
the German language PLUS in the East-European diaspora: Poland,
CzechoSlovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Rusia) the other
/r/, the apical one, is in use. AFAIK, no other modern Germanic
language (dialect) has the uvular /r/ variants extant in German
(of which only *some* are similar to that of French). So much
so that the "heaviest" influence exerted on the pronunciation
you hear in the Middle German spoken in Saxony and in Suebia
(Württemberg; but here with notable exceptions in groups uttering
the apical /r/). So much so that these people require hard
diction training if they want to hide their typical accents
whenever they wanna speak standard Hochdeutsch (for theatre and
radio-TV purposes).
>Translation: their pronounciation is what is considered standard.
This translation is a bit misleading. The correct translation is:
the way they pronounce *Hochdeutsch* is by and large (i.e. with
exceptions) accepted as such. But this is not accepted by the
native-speakers approx. South of Cologne and Frankfurt; and in
the Oberdeutsch provinces, from Alsatia to the lake of Balaton in
Hungary, that pronunciation is perceived as the one by the ...
hated "Prussians". (Esp. the "Frankisation" of -ig /ik/ > /iç/
(e.g. fünfzig /fünftsiç/) is frowned upon in the South.)
>Of course. That's the whole purpose of the Danish language: not to >be understood by the Germans.
Seemingly, there is a considerable discrepancy betw. what's written
and how it is to be pronounced.
>Germanic -p-,-b-; -t-,-d-; -k-,-g- -> Danish -β-;-ð-;-γ-
How is this "beta" to be pronounced? And this "gamma"? (As do the
Greeks? I know how it is pronounced in Greek.)
>I can understand that the Germans think that it is humorous how
>the Danish language fails to be a dialect of German.
A colleague of mine, who got the Danish citizenship (per Einbürge-
rung) in the early 80s gave me some pronunciations examples (I
didn't understand anything :)) and told me Danish is easy to learn
for whoever is in good command of German (and that Danish lang.
grammar was easier). (I have no idea whether I was told the truth
or my colleague exaggerated.)
>I dare not contemplate the day when they discover we never had that >intention.
How bad must have been German behavior in .dk if even in such
benign and joking bits of talk you feel like adding something
like this. (Perhaps those bad Germans were from among "de Saupreiss'n"
and less from among Alpine ones. :))
George