Talk:Dutch phonology

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It seems to me this article and International Phonetic Alphabet for Dutch are covering a lot of the same ground and would benefit from being merged. Since articles on phonologies of languages are generally called "XXX phonology" (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Phonetics#Language phonologies), I say this article is the right place to merge to. Thoughts? User:Angr 16:17, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

There's been some debate about this for other articles, because the IPA articles are often in the business of explaining how the language's orthography translates into IPA, which is really not the same as the language's phonology. So some languages have articles called "X Phonology" and "X Orthography", whereas others have one article called "X Phonology and Orthography".

Honestly, both of these articles are so incomplete and disorganized that it might be better for someone with knowledge of Dutch (...not me, unfortunately) to cannibalize them both to create a new article or articles, depending on what the consensus is on having two articles versus one. --Armchairlinguist 18:01, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

The Dutch IPA article was really just a brief orthography guide, and I don't see much harm in keeping such information here as long as the focus of the rest of the article remains on phonology/phonetics rather than spelling. I've merged the two for now.

Peter ^Isotalo 23:00, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Why is there no colon after the [o] in the example transcriptions of <goal> and <oven>? This seems inconsistent with the rest of the article. Change?Homun 15:03, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Homun, you are touching upon a more extensive problem. In Dutch people refer to the a in zak /ɑ/ as de korte a (the short a) and the one in zaak /a/ as 'de lange a'. Unfortunately the difference is really more a matter of laxness or openness and not of length. De length hardly matters. If fact the only words where length as such is phonemic is in pairs like dor - door. /dɔr/ - /dɔ:r/ (and yes this Dutch speaker actually uses /r/...rrroling!). I think it would be better to limit the use of the colon to such cases but I don't think that there is agreement upon that point

The vowel sounds before r are rather different and that is not discussed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 152.1.193.137 (talk) 21:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Flemish/Southern Dutch

I think the article is still a little too much biased towards ‘standard’ Dutch. The word in itself is not even well-defined, because there is a Flemish standard as well. For example:

• In the south, there are (almost) no diphthongs: e: really is a long e, same with ø: and o:, ɛi is ɛ:, œy is œ: and ʌu is ʌ:. This should at least be mentioned below the chart, or even better: in a separate chart.
• The w is pronounced w in some areas.
• Mention that the ‘standard’ Dutch of the south is that as spoken on Belgian television. I do not think this is existent as a real spoken language anywhere. There is a ‘Standard Flemish’, however, but that would be another article, since its status is disputed.

Then I have some comments which are not specific to the south:

• I am not sure whether ʃ is not a native sound: it occurs, infrequently in words like sjaal, sjouwen, sjorren... The sound is not necessarily the same as in meisje, huisje.
• r is sometimes realized as ɹ, the ‘Gooise r’ phenomenon, mostly famous from the music show ‘Kinderen voor Kinderen’.

I made these changes in the Orthography chart before it was merged with this page, but I am not enough of a specialist to describe these phenomena rigourously. Hamaryns 10:15, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Regarding KvK and the "Gooise r", I found this article from the 15 July 2000 NRC Handelsblad amusing. Unhappily for any effort to create a concise yet accurate description of Dutch phonology is the proposition expressed in the tagline "Het Nederlands heeft twaalf erren, zonder veel samenhang" — "Dutch has 12 R's [i.e. 12 different ways of pronouncing r], without much relation to each other." In the article a professor surmises that Kinderen voor Kinderen sing-along CDs are responsible for spreading Gooise r through emulation and repetition, particularly by pre-teen girls. -- IslandGyrl 14:10, 17 January 2007 (UTC)