VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
[±tense] would have to be substituted for the feature [±closed], as proposed by Stevens
(1999).
A further opposition is evident from the distribution of the so-called tense vs. the
so-called lax vowels: tense vowels are described as long, and lax vowels as short. The
relevant distinctive feature could, therefore, also be a temporal one, namely [±long]
(Hertrich & Ackermann 1997).
A brief look at the orthographic representation of items with tense or lax vowels
shows that items with tense vowels are represented as a sequence of vowel + consonant,
whereas items with lax vowels are represented as vowel + double consonant. This
graphemic representation has historical roots and reflects the fact that Classical Middle
High German made use of ambisyllabic consonants.
4.1. The feature [±tense]: brief historical outline
A comprehensive historical outline of the opposition, its change and results, both in
Standard German and two German dialects (Alemannic and Bavarian), has been given
by Ronneberger-Sibold (1999). It will be summed up here briefly, since the results of
her discussion shed light on many of the manifold observations made in vowel
production.
Classical Middle High German made use of a three-way opposition as concerns
the stressed syllables:
schāle schale Schalle
/Sa:lW/ /Sa.lW/ /Sal.lW/
shell, dish inflected form of schal, stale to resound (inflected form)
With respect to prosodic length, two short syllables were equivalent to one long
syllable, therefore, schale /Sa.lW/ was equivalent in length with /Sa:/ in schāle and with
/Sal./ in schalle (each consisting of two moras). These durational equivalences were an
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