0.6 The glottal stop and consonant clusters — Epoché
What you will be able to do Hear and produce the small closure of the throat that German puts in front of a word beginning with a vowel, and stop running one word into the next as English does. Start a word with the consonant groups English does not allow — Pf- , Zw- , Kn- , Str- — without slipping a vowel into the middle of them. Finish a word with a long run of consonants, such as the five at the end of kämpfst , [mpfst], written -mpfst . Read twenty-four short sentences from the corpus at speaking speed, which is what the whole sounds volume has been building toward. Prerequisites : 0.5 — the ends of syllables were the theme there, and this lesson is about their beginnings, so the two fit together. You will also use the two frictions from 0.4 and the rounded vowels from 0.3 in the sentences at the end. Everything in the sounds volume so far has been about single sounds. This lesson is about the joins, and it is the one that decides whether your German sounds German or sounds like English words with German vowels in them. There are two topics. The first is what happens between two words. The second is what happens when three or four consonants arrive at once. Both come down to the same instruction: do not smooth anything. German does not join its words English is a language that links. Say an apple at normal speed and listen to where the n goes: it attaches itself to the front of the second word, so that what you actually produce is closer to a napple . Say not at all and the two t sounds migrate forward onto the next word in the same way. Say far away in a British accent and an r appears out of nowhere to fill the gap between the vowels. English treats a stretch of speech as a single stream and lets the syllables fall where they may; word boundaries are a fact about the writing, not about the sound. German refuses. When a word begins with a vowel, a speaker puts a brief complete closure of the vocal folds in front of it — a catch in the throat, written [ʔ] — and that closure is what keeps the boundary audible. The stream is cut into words, and a German listener uses the cuts to work out where one word stops. You already own the sound. It is the catch in the middle of English uh-oh . It is what many speakers of English put in place of the t in bottle or butter . It is the little grunt at the start of an emphatic absolutely not . What you do not have is the habit of using it as a boundary marker, and that is the only thing to acquire. German — where the closure goes What an English speaker does instead ein Apfel — an apple runs the n onto the second word, giving something like ei napfel am Abend — in the evening runs the m across, giving a mabend ein Ei — an egg makes one long vowel of it instead of two words Guten Abend — good evening runs the n across, so the n moves onto the next word and the boundary disappears es ist acht — it is eight joins all three, giving one continuous stretch beachten — to pay attention to runs the prefix straight into the stem; German puts the closure inside the word, in front of the stressed vowel The last row matters more than it looks. The closure appears not only between words but at the seam inside a compound or after a prefix, wherever the part that follows begins with a vowel and carries stress. That is why long German words do not blur: each piece announces itself. The word for a fried egg is built from the word for a mirror and the word for an egg, and you can hear the seam. There is a side effect worth naming, because learners misread it. All this cutting is what makes German sound clipped, or to some English ears abrupt or even angry. It is nothing of the kind. It is punctuation — the language's way of telling you where the words are — and once you produce it yourself the impression disappears. Consonants arriving three and four at a time German lets clusters stand at the beginning of a word that English does not permit, and the English reflex when faced with one is to insert a small vowel to break it up. That insertion is the giveaway. The word for a horse becomes two syllables instead of one. The remedy is mechanical: put your mouth in position for the whole cluster before you start, and release it in one movement. Take the four that cost the most. The first is the pair written Pf , which English has nowhere at all at the start of a word. You can steal it from the middle of a phrase: say top farm quickly, or the word cupful , and notice that the p and the f run together into a single release. That is the cluster. Now put it at the front of a word. The second is the pair written Zw . Remember that the letter z is [ts] in native German words, not [z], so this cluster is three sounds: [tsv]. English has [ts] mostly at the ends of words — cats , bits , rates — and hardly ever at the start, so the trick is the same one: say cats veer and steal the join. The numeral for two begins this way, and so does the numeral for twelve. The third is the pair written Kn , and this one is another fossil of exactly the kind you met in lesson 0.4. English wrote it and then stopped saying it: knee , knight , know , knife , knot all begin with a silent k that used to be pronounced. German never dropped it. So the German word for a knee is the English word with the k put back, and once you see that, half a dozen words come with it. The fourth is the group written Str , which is three sounds but not the three you would guess: the s before t or p at the start of a word is [ʃ], and the r is the back consonant from 0.5. So the word for a beach begins [ʃtʁ], and an English speaker who reads the letters as written produces a cluster German does not have. Cluster, and a word that has it How to get there from English [pf] — das Pferd [pfeːɐ̯t], horse steal the join from cupful ; do not say a vowel between the two letters [pfl] — die Pflanze [ˈpflantsə], plant the same, with the l added to the release [tsv] — zwei [tsvaɪ], two steal the [ts] from cats ; the letter is not [z] in