German Linguistics Lectures

11.23 Rolls or Trills

• Rolls are sounds that are formed when one of the organs of speech hits another in quick succession.
• This is key to German /r/ sounds, which can also be described as voiced uvular fricatives.
• There are many regional differences in the formation of this sound that is found in words such as rot and Straße.

11.24 The phoneme /r/ after vowels

• In the speech of many German speakers, such words as hier, der, Tür and Wörter have no friction in the /r/ sound.
• The result is a diphthong whose second part can be represented as /ɐ/.
• Thus hier represented phonetically would be /hiɐ/
• der = /deɐ/; Tür = /tyɐ/
• Wörter = /vœɐtɐ/

11.25 Describing German vowels

• Our Roman alphabet is too vague to describe English and German vowels.
• For example, ‘e’ is pronounced very differently in the words bed and below.
• The sounds represented by German ‘o’ differ in the words Ofen and Offen.
• Vowel length is a very important factor in establishing the German vowel phonemes.