Talk:Afrikaans phonology

Pronunciation of long A ("aa") and of G

I've got a handful of questions/observations.
1) I've never heard Afrikaans long A (as in kaart) realized as /aː/ but always as a very distinctive back vowel, namely [ɑː]. Is /a:/ chosen because of historical reasons or because it is easier to write than the symbol 〈ɑ〉? I know that in many languages /r/ is usually chosen as standard over the actual [ʁ] or [ɹ] for simplicity.

2) From what I've heard, the 〈g〉 is usually pronounced as the voiceless uvular fricative /χ/. In fact, that page even lists Afrikaans as one of the languages that has the sound, namely goed pronounced as [χut], whereas in this article, goed is transcribed as /xut/.
I understand the difference between the /.../ and [...] notation but I find it almost painfully wrong that the softer G variant here is referred to as the sound /ç/, rather than choosing /χ/ and /x/. Is /ç/ and /x/ the actual standard (sort of like English RP, if you will), historical or just because people are more used to the /x/ and /ç/ symbols?
I noticed that the "ch" sound of Swiss German is referred to as "always [x], or in many dialects even [χ]" and as a native speaker of Zürich German (the dialect that probably has the most uvular pronunciation of "ch" of all Swiss regions) I can assure you that the Afrikaans pronunciation of 〈g〉 is even more in the back, so this opposition confuses me.

3) Some information on when 〈g〉 is pronounced as /g/ as opposed to the usual fricative would be very interesting. This article lists the pronunciation of sorge as [ˈsɔrɡə] and I know that Dutch zorgen is pronounced something like /'zɔrɣə/. So this would be an interesting opposition to Dutch and an interesting fact to know in general. 84.75.9.162 (talk) 19:02, 5 February 2014 (UTC) (lKj)

1. "Is /a:/ chosen because of historical reasons or because it is easier to write than the symbol 〈ɑ〉?" Maybe. Either way, that's how Donaldson writes it.

2a. "Is /ç/ and /x/ the actual standard (sort of like English RP, if you will), historical or just because people are more used to the /x/ and /ç/ symbols?" I don't know, that's how Donaldson writes it.

2b. "I can assure you that the Afrikaans pronunciation of 〈g〉 is even more in the back, so this opposition confuses me." There's no /ç/ in Afrikaans, therefore there is no opposition that you're talking about.

3. The only thing I know about [g] is that it's an occasional allophone of /x/. Peter238 (talk) 21:54, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

This page needs attention

The vowel section is seriously lacking. Other phonology articles have diagrams of vowel targets, often in table form; this one needs something like that rather than just a list—especially because it's a list of phones, not phonemes. I see that some allophones are noted as such, but it looks to me like at least /iː/, /uː/, and /yː/ are also allophones, as they precede /r/ in their example words. I am not knowledgeable on the subject of Afrikaans phonology, and reading this page in its current form doesn't change that. _{(suoı̣ʇnqı̣ɹʇuoɔ · ʞlɐʇ)} nɯnuı̣ɥԀ 19:40, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

It's not as simple as saying that the page needs a diagram of vowel targets. We need sources for such things. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10118063.1993.9723910 could be used to make a formant chart. If someone has access to it (or is able to pay for it - it's pretty expensive), go for it. Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 13:13, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

"suutjies"

I'm sure the transcription of "suutjies" is quite wrong - it ought to be something more like ['sykis]. I'm not sure enough about the rightness of my transcription though to change it to that, but it should certainly be changed from what it is! 195.171.114.69 (talk) 11:45, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Done. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 21:52, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Afrikaans EU sound

What is the best way to transcribe it on wiktionary for example? In the recordings I heard on forvo the variant of Donaldson [øə] is the most obvious one. Should it be mentioned here as the main variant?
https://forvo.com/word/deur/#af
https://forvo.com/word/neus/#af
https://forvo.com/word/seun/#af
https://forvo.com/word/beursie/#af
85.30.49.168 (talk) 00:15, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

All of these sound like [eø] or even [iø], not [øə], so our transcription /eø/ is the most correct one. Mr KEBAB (talk) 14:20, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

On second thought, deur does sound somewhat more like [øə], but that's probably just a positional allophone before /r/. Mr KEBAB (talk) 14:22, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Update: I changed the transcription to [ɪø] per Lass and de Villiers - see [1]. Mr KEBAB (talk) 10:43, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Vowel charts

A couple of days ago I added a monophthong chart to the article. The source is extremely old, but the monophthong chart that it has looks fairly accurate even for modern standard Afrikaans. I didn't include the 'close-mid monophthongs' /eː, øː, oː/, as these are often [ɪə, ɪø, ʊə] in modern standard Afrikaans, i.e. diphthongs.

However, I advise against using their diphthong chart, as, first of all, it doesn't include [ɪə, ɪø, ʊə], the /œi/ diphthong is transcribed ⟨œy⟩ and has too central an ending point (as if it were [œy], and it's not - in modern standard Afrikaans it is [œi], with an unrounded second element), whereas /œu/ is shown as its outdated counterpart [ou]. Mr KEBAB (talk) 16:17, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

I've just replaced that vowel chart with a much more recent one. Mr KEBAB (talk) 23:30, 17 April 2017 (UTC)