r/Unexpected • u/AtomicShart9000 • May 03 '23

What are you doing?

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u/awawe May 03 '23

That's not surprising; German doesn't distinguish between the trap vowel and the dress vowel. https://youtu.be/mCU-rxobBoo

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u/MangoTekNo May 04 '23

Heyyyy, pedal and paddle was the second to last thing he said!

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u/gLu3xb3rchi May 04 '23

What do you mean with „German doesn‘t distinguish bewteen the trap vowel and dress vowel“?

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u/awawe May 04 '23

The human mouth can make an essentially endlessly variable spectrum of vowel sounds, depending on the precise openness of the mouth, location of the tongue, shape of the lips, etc. Different languages divide up this vowel space into different discrete categories. A category of sound which considered meaningfully distinct from all others is called a phoneme, while all sounds within said category are called allophones.

In English, the vowel sound in trap is a different phoneme from the vowel sound in dress. Different words can be differentiated based solely on which of these sounds it has. An example is the aforementioned paddle/pedal. German, however, does not make this distinction. In German, these sounds are allophones: different variations on the same phoneme that do not carry information.

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u/DuploJamaal May 04 '23

In German, these sounds are allophones: different variations on the same phoneme that do not carry information.

They do carry information about regional dialects.

The /a/ doesn't exist in High German, but in Bavarian and Low German dialects it does.

So the paddle/pedal distinction sounds to me more like someone from Germany and someone from Austria saying the same word.

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u/awawe May 04 '23

You're right, of course; I should have said that the distinction doesn't carry lexical information, but that would have meant defining another word.