From Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Thu Apr 11 12:53:11 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_1); 11 Apr 2002 19:53:11 -0000 Received: (qmail 91865 invoked from network); 11 Apr 2002 17:35:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.217) by m4.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 11 Apr 2002 17:35:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO n3.grp.scd.yahoo.com) (66.218.66.86) by mta2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 11 Apr 2002 17:35:28 -0000 Received: from [66.218.67.140] by n3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 11 Apr 2002 17:35:27 -0000 Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 17:35:26 -0000 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: brify Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <200204111402.KAA26325@mail.reutershealth.com> User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Length: 1554 X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster From: "aolung" X-Originating-IP: 212.144.144.120 X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=37407270 X-Yahoo-Profile: aolung --- In lojban@y..., John Cowan wrote: > And Rosta scripsit: >=20 > > But what I don't understand is how you can consider it a strong habit, > > when final -e in German is E-like rather than schwa-like. It seems rath= =3D=0D er > > mysterious that Germans should in their Lojban and Esperanto speech > > all tend to introduce a mispronunciation whose aetiology is not transpa= =3D=0D rently > > a carryover from their native language. Maybe there are German accents= =3D=0D > > I'm not familiar with in which final -e is schwa-like; my limited expos= =3D=0D ure to=20 > > them has a southern bias. >=20 > Certainly my mother, a native speaker and a northerner whose German was > rather close to normative (the result of being part of a family that spok= =3D=0D e > close-to-Standard German among a sea of dialect speakers) always > rendered final -e (not -er) as [@], and taught it that way too. > Standard German, after all, is essentially a Low pronunciation of > High German. Thinking all this over, I have to agree with Steven and John: There's infac= =3D=0D t a=20 difference in pronouncing the -e in nothern and southern German accent such= =3D=0D =20 that e.g. people from Niedersachsen (Lower Saxonia?) usually say {bity} for= =3D=0D =20 "bitte" (please), whereas Bavarians tend to pronounce it more e-like (very = =3D=0D short=20 and more open - but not as open as e.g. in Hungarian-German pronunciation, = =3D=0D which very often is "bitt=E4=E4"). So it seems that Bj=F6rn pronounces lb {= brife}=3D=0D the=20 same way like the German word "Briefe" (letters) :-) Thanks for making me realize this! .aulun.