gfl87 wrote:@ Johanna: probably I was wrong: I listened again to your recordings. I find in <dusch, push, marsch> you undoubtedly pronounce [ʂ]; you probably pronounce the same sound in <hässja, kanske, broschyr>, and even in <tjata, kela, kjol, tjuta, köl, fascist, crescendo>.
So, yes, you merge them all! It's just I wasn't aware such a merger existed.
The sound I have in ⟨tjata, kela, kjol, tjuta, kjöl⟩ is definitely not [ʂ], I have the same tj-sound as people up north and they differentiate /ɕ/ and /ʂ/, the former being the tj-sound and the latter their only realisation of the sj-sound. I can also hear a clear difference between the sound I have in those words compared to the one in for example ⟨hässja⟩ when listening to the recording; I'm actually surprised the difference is as big as it turned out to be.
Or... I
might have [ʃ] for the tj-sound in initial position, I can't really hear the difference between it and [ɕ], but it's not further back than that in any case. Although, I doubt it since it feels different to pronounce than English /ʃ/, more j-ish kind of.
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The merger isn't about using the same sound everywhere, it's about having turned three different phonemes into one, but it still has a couple of allophones that depend on the exact environment, and in this case it seems like the allophones are the same sounds as the original phonemes, but the borders between them broke down and they got all scrambled.
The split between the back and front sj-sounds happened first of course, the back sj-sound is comparably new, and without that split this three-way merger probably wouldn't have happened. I mean, the accents that still have only a front sj-sound haven't merged it with the tj-sound, but they have with /rs/.
In the south there is no merger, but that's because they only have the back sj-sound, and their /rs/ is either [ʁs] or [ʀs], so there's nothing very similar to /ɕ/ to merge it with.
There's no merger in Finland either for similar reasons: their sj-sound is [ʃ] or [ɕ], their tj-sound is [t͡ʃ] or [t͡ɕ], and their /rs/ is [ɾs] or [rs]. Which of the two alternatives in each pair someone uses depends on their accent or dialect, there are quite a few in Finland too.
gfl87 wrote:I can't completely understand: <det är> has to be either /deː/ or /dɛː/, or either /deː eː/ or /dɛː ɛː/? (In Hedelin, the forms with /eː/ are labelled as eastern ones.)
I meant that you have to pronounce ⟨det är⟩ either as /deː eː/ or as /dɛː ɛː/, never /deː ɛː/ or /dɛː eː/.
In normal speech one of them or both are usually unstressed though, and then /eː/ may turn into [ɛ] in the unstressed word since the vowel gets reduced and the border between /e/ and /ɛ/ pretty much disappears. Besides, most accents don't even have /e/, only /ɛ/, and that includes those that are as close to a truly neutral one as you get.
gfl87 wrote:Yup, so Jurgen's right, but I reckon the real fault is putting /deːt/ as the first choice in the entry, making seem that's the normal/usual pronunciation.
Mhhm, it's actually the least preferable pronunciation
Together with /dɛːt/ that is
gfl87 wrote:I suppose all those authors avoided to put /dɛː/, because for some reason –although not regional– it maybe has less prestige than /de(ː)/.
A tiny, tiny bit perhaps, but not really.
/deːt/ and /dɛːt/ are definitely weird to include if you leave /dɛː/ out, since even though they aren't low prestige per se, they sound stupid to most people unless they're really stressed. And a person who has /dɛːt/ when stressing the word extra much has /dɛː/ when stressing it normally.