PHY230 - The Sound System of German

German is the national language of Germany Austria and many other countries it exhibits a number of dialects which are not inherently intelligible with each other the main variety of German is referred to as Deutsche hoosh praha or Deutsche standard Lawton modern high german it developed from the Chancellery of Saxony gaining acceptance as a written standard in the 16th and 17th centuries this electra discusses the segmental phonological inventory of german on the basis of its main variety standard german this includes the discussion of the modern high german phonemes some selected aspects of allo phonic variation including the discussion of special variants in some german dialects let us start with a brief look at the inventory of the German phonemes first in modern high german we can define a total of 48 phonemes there are sixteen monophthongs it depends a little bit as we will see in a second 8 v ons and twenty four consonants the vowel phonemes differ among the varieties of German to a relatively large extent the consonantal phonemes by contrast are almost identical in the varieties of German yet there allophonic realization is different in a number of cases the monophthongs can be subdivided into long or short or more precisely into tenths and lakhs tense vowels involve a greater muscular energy during articulation and lacks vows involve a relatively little muscular energy during articulation since the tense monophthongs are generally longer than the last ones the colon is normally added in their turn description let's look at the long monophthongs first so as already said there are seven long monophthongs or eight depending on whether the two front vowels E and air have merged most speakers especially those who use the northern accents of German like myself merge these two vowels everywhere for example in words such as bein the berries and Biren the bears which are now homophones others generally keep them apart thus they have one vowel more so they would say beelin the berries and the baron the bears but even those who keep them generally apart for example in some verb forms in order to distinguish the subjunctive or indicative as in verbs like a gaba versus Akiba even they still only have one vowel e so let us illustrate the german sound system on the basis of the merger of the two front vowels so on the basis of seven long monophthongs now here's one example per phoneme we have an e as in feeling there is an e as in beat hello central vowel R as in zat a mid high back vowel o as in boat and a high back vowel as in hoot and then there are two special vowels innately two rounded front vowels ooh as in uber and ooh as in let us now add the short or Laksmana thumbs to the system of the long or tens ones so here are the nine short monophthongs again I will produce one example per monophthong we have a short e as in bist mid low front vowel a as in heta there is a low central values shorter than the other one that so there's a contrast between Zack and Zack here is the mid low back vowel or as in post then a short ooh as in bus and again we have two rounded front vowels the shorter as in Houla and the short o as in gutless and last but not least there are two central vowels the schwa in unstressed position ala and a low central ball R as in words such as Besser okay so much for the mono phones let us now deal with the German deforms German has eight difference that can be grouped into up gliding diphthongs and down gliding diphthongs and as we would see there's one difference there's one diphthong that is slightly exceptional well here they are let us start with the down gliding ones we haven't the diphthong ear as in tear there is an air as in tear another down gliding different is or as in tour and then one with a rounded front vowel onset you are as in tour these diphthong have in common that they occur in words where we find a post vocalic also graphical are again the words are tear tear tour and tour let's now look at the up gliding ones there is i as in hi ow back up gliding as in how and then i as in hi where the offset is rounded but could also be treated as unrounded hoi hoi so there's a lot of variation involved and last but not least we have we as in hui or free and this one is a little bit special the sample words are primarily interjections hui and free as you can see here the offset is a little bit lower or well maybe level with the onset so it's not really up gliding anymore maybe it's level but it's a sort of fronting diphthong here are the consonants and as I said earlier on there are 24 consonants in modern high german now this continental system is by no means exceptional but the following aspects are special in German in most varieties of German the voice plosives da da and ger and the voiced fricatives are d voice in final position so let's look at two examples to illustrate this effect here we have the door as in Rudy done and in the final position regard and in the final position you can clearly hear it it is the voice that the same applies to the voiced labiodental fricative vos and then in final in the final position we have don't have Brava but brough so clearly an effect of final devoicing in German some consonants have a limited distribution as far as the allophones are concerned for example the alveolar fricative never occurs word initially so which like words like symbol come out as symbol in German clearly a voiced alveolar fricative and then there is the velar nasal again it has a limited distribution it only occurs at the end of syllables so in the syllable coda some consonants involve a high degree of variation and this applies in particular to the realization of the R in German we will come back to this in a second a number of phonemes exhibit variants that occur in complimentary distribution or are free variants of a particular phoneme both supplement the phonological analysis is of German so let's look at these effects in more detail let's look at vocalic variation first and as one effect refer to as the shortening of long vowels now depending on their position whether they are stressed or unstressed most long vowels can be shortened let us look at the examples on the board I will first of all produce the long ones which occur in stress position fear beat boat hoot ruber and another short ones where the vowel does not occur in a stress position Studio meat on morale coolant lukina and per Coulomb another aspect is refer to as free variation now some vowel phonemes can be replaced by an alternative without changing the meaning this phenomenon which does not occur in standard German is referred to as vocalic variation the example that I have here is the word yen sights which can either be pronounced with along a in sites or with a short a yen sites central vowels are also quite interesting in German the schwa is generally defined as a phoneme in German even though some of its allophones deviate considerably in terms of their vowel quality here are three variants Haza clearly a central vowel then we have Besser which involves in the unstressed position alo central vowel and in the word Gotham the vowel is dropped altogether let us look at some aspects of continental variation next probably the most interesting one concerns the realization of our in German now let's illustrate this on the basis of one word the word rat mutter in German there are three main variants the first one is the alveolar trill as in Rutter this occurs mostly in bavarian Franconian so in the southern dialects and quite interestingly in singing the uvula trill rata can be used as a free variant of the voice doula fricative cutter some people even make it more front replacing it by a voiced velar fricative cutter in syllable final position the orthographical r is often realized as a low central vowel as in motor so we don't say mutter but mutter an interesting phoneme which is often used as an example of complimentary distribution is the phoneme that has the two allophones here and her as in ich where the palatal fricative occurs after a front vowel and ba where the velar fricative occurs after a back vowel however if we include morphological variation and morphological aspects for example the diminutive then the allophones may be treated as different phonemes so there is a distinction between crucian a small cow and Kohan the cake well so much for the system of phonemes of German as usual in our elections about a particular language or a variety of it a sample text read by a native speaker will be presented in this case since my mother tongue is German I can do it myself and as usual I'm using the story of the north wind and the Sun so here is the German version can I have it okay yes thank you so here it is ein straightens is not wind on Zhanna - in baden boy - d'eryka la villa at Sun Bandera then environment mantle guruva this Vegas de here calm Z Boden INEC does their unique evidence darker than gate insulter did in vandewoude swing and we'll design a mantle up to Nieman they are not win please MIT al-ahmad a Bahama a please desta Festa Hooters Easter Bundoora in Zion and mantle iron English captain oughtn't then come off moon Avanti dishonored aloof material fine play him Stalin on shown Ave negan Augenblick on octave and aha Shannon mantle house dumbest idea not win sue gaben Dusty's on the phone in Biden - dark color bar well this may suffice as an example let's summarize in this lecture I tried to outline the sound system of German using examples where necessary I also included some aspects of variation especially on the level of allophones a number of aspects were not mentioned in this election for example the enormous variation as far as German dialects are concerned or aspects of connected speech which influenced the rhythm of German and the pronunciation of words and syllables beyond their pronunciation in isolation these aspects will be added in our contrastive a lecture present-day English versus German where we will focus on the central principles of teaching English to native speakers of German so see you again in that particular lecture

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Keywords: Linguistics, Phonology, German, Modern, High German, In-Class, Vowels, Consonants, Jürgen Handke, Handke, Linguistics Online, VLC, Virtual Linguistics Campus, Inverted Classroom, Flipped Classroom, E-Lecture, University, College, Student, Education, Community, educational, mobile device, Marburg, University of Marburg, IWB086

Id: uc-mtGPD3-U

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2012