VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
Long vowel + lenis plosive Mieder (bodice) /mi:dEr/
Long vowel + fortis plosive Mieter (tenant) /mi:tEr/
Short vowel + fortis plosive Mitte (middle) /mçtE/
Short vowel + lenis plosive Widder (ram) /vçdEr/
In Standard German, vowel + consonant do not form a structural unit. Ronneberger-
Sibold concludes, supported by her analysis of the pronunciation of lexical creations,
that the assumption of ambisyllabic consonants, and consequently the assumption of a
closed syllable in items like schalle, has no evidence in Standard German. Standard
German and the Alemanic dialects have to be analysed with what Ronneberger-Sibold
describes as the plain model, i.e. the stressed syllables both in Schale (shell, dish) and
schalle (to resound, inflected form) are open, the former containing a long vowel, the
latter a short vowel. The ambisyllabic model, which requires syllabic isochrony, makes
sense in an analysis of Central and North Bavarian dialects, where, at least in many
variants, ambisyllabic consonants can be observed (for a more detailed discussion see
Ronneberger-Sibold 1999).
4.2. Temporal Analysis
4.2.1. Isochrony in Standard German
As can be seen from the above analyses, the morae-counting structure of Classical
Middle High German has developed in different ways in diverse variants of German,
resulting in two main groups: those preserving isochrony and those giving up isochrony.
Standard German, as has been discussed in Ronneberger-Sibold (1999), belongs
to the group that has given up isochrony. Instead, stressed syllables have either a long or
a short vowel, without any structural constraints as concerns the following consonant.
Moreover, Standard German has changed the quality of the short vowels, in this way
maintaining, or better, enhancing distinctiveness. Jessen et al. (1995) showed that the
distinction of vowel quality (based on F1 and F2 measurements) is maintained in both
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