VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
important element of Old High German and Middle High German quantifying poetry;
therefore, it was concluded that the distinctive feature was a temporal one.
This Middle High German three-way opposition was reduced to two-way
oppositions, but in different ways for different variants:
In some Alemanic variants, the geminates were given up: schalle merged with
schale. Two types of open syllables were left: /Sa:-/ in Schale (shell, dish) with a long
vowel and /Sal.-/ in schalle (to resound, inflected form) and schale (stale, inflected
form) with a short vowel.
The reduction of oppositions was not as simple in the non-Alemanic variants.
Firstly, in Standard German and in the Central and North Bavarian variants, the Middle
High German items of the type /Sa.lW/ with a short open syllable were given up. Items of
this type merged either with the type /Sa:.lW/ – a long open syllable – or with the type
/Sal.lW/ – a closed syllable. Therefore, as oppositions two types remained: /Sa:.lW/ and
/Sal.lW/. The result was syllabic isochrony: all stressed syllables were two moras long.
This syllabic isochrony has been retained in Central and North Bavarian with an
additional constraint concerning obstruents: a long vowel is followed by a lenis
consonant, e.g. Feder (feather) [v5e:dÇ] and a short vowel is followed by long or fortis
consonant, e.g. Vetter (cousin) [v5etÇ], [v5ed5d5Ç] or [v5ettÇ], consonant and vowel forming
a structural unit (see also Bannert 1977 for a thorough discussion of isochrony in
Bavarian dialects). In this context, it is of interest that Swedish, Norwegian and
Icelandic show the same sort of 'complementary quantity' (Schaeffler et al. 2002).
In Standard German, where all geminates were degeminated, the short vowels
remained. The former closed syllables became open and the contrast between short and
long vowels has been enhanced by a co-occuring contrast of quality. The Bavarian
constraint of a vowel – consonant combination is, therefore, not found in Standard
German. In this variant, all four possible combinations of vowels and consonants are
found: