# German /t/ sounds like [ts]?



## gjuhetar

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The song mentioned here is Jasper, "Der HDL-Song".* However, on a side note, the pronunciation in this song is rather standard for German accents (that is, accents of speakers from Germany - Swiss German and Austrian are a different matter ;-).

In this song, the singer's word-initial /t/ sounds a bit like [ts], though not exactly like German /z/, being more like word-initial /t/ in Danish and some English dialects, which have been affricated to become like [ts].

I have tried in vain to find academic articles about what I wanted to know.
I am not sure if I perceived it wrong or which varieties of German have that sound.


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## Polyglotta

The very hissed /h/ with its very small aperture after the initial t can easily be perceived as /ts/, I suppose. (Remember, h and s are two very related sounds, anyway.)


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## berndf

Polyglotta said:


> The very hissed /h/ with its very small aperture after the initial t can easily be perceived as /ts/, I suppose. (Remember, h and s are two very related sounds, anyway.)


I agree. What you are hearing is aspiration, i.e. [tʰ] not [ts]. In German, aspiration distinguishes fortis an lenis plosives. An unaspirated [t] is perceived as a "d".


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## Polyglotta

Right. When you say e.g. "My name is DTaubler." then people (especially in the South) might ask you "Mit hartem oder mit weichem DT?" Linguistically, this is somewhat confusing to a student of Slavistics, because there it ( hard vs weak) means something totally different. But nevertheless the unaspirated fortis "p" in Spiel or Sport or Speer should (like the "t" in Stein, Stimme etc.)  be pronounced "stronger" than the "b" in Waschbär. At least if you follow Siebs, and try to keep yourself free from provincialisms.


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## berndf

Polyglotta said:


> But nevertheless the unaspirated fortis "p" in Spiel or Sport or Speer should (like the "t" in Stein, Stimme etc.) be pronounced "stronger" than the "b" in Waschbär. At least if you follow Siebs, and try to keep yourself free from provincialisms.


To be honest, I think this is just othographic bias. I see no difference whatsoever between the pronunciation of Spiel and a hypothetical word *_Schbiel_. We are just used to the fact that the phoneme combination /ʃb/ is spelled "sp". The only difference to _Waschbär_ is the syllable break between "sch" and "b".


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## Hutschi

In Saxony you can hear a clear difference.

In *_Schbiel_" it is not aspirated while in "_Schpiel_" it is. May be this is an overcompensation here, because in the dialect all such consonants are spoken soft (weich) and unaspirated. Most people "b" think it is voiced but in reality it isn't. It is just not aspirated.

So  here "packen" and "backen" sound equal even in the local coll. language.  Only if the people try to speak "standard German" (called "Hochdeutsch" or "richtig" - mother says: "Sprich richtig!") you can hear the difference.


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## berndf

Hutschi said:


> In *_Schbiel_" it is not aspirated while in "_Schpiel_" it is. *May be this is an overcompensation* here


It must be hyper-correction. Where I com from we distinguish between aspirated and non-aspirated very clearly and I feel sp difference how I pronounce the b/p in _Spiel_ and in _Biel_.


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## Dan2

Polyglotta said:


> The very hissed /h/ with its very small aperture after the initial t can easily be perceived as /ts/, I suppose. (Remember, h and s are two very related sounds, anyway.)





berndf said:


> I agree. What you are hearing is aspiration, i.e. [tʰ] not [ts]. In German, aspiration distinguishes fortis an lenis plosives. An unaspirated [t] is perceived as a "d".



I'm not sure we've really answered gjuhetar's question.  As a native speaker of Hindi and probably someone who knows English well, he certainly knows what aspiration sounds like, and what he's saying is that he's _not_ hearing [tʰ] (which he expects in German) but rather something more like [ts].

There are several word-initial /t/'s in this song and I hear them all as unremarkable except for the word "tu'" near the beginning, which I, like gjuhetar, hear as more than just an aspirated /t/.  (If you native Germans disagree, I'd point out that it's sometimes easier for a non-native to "hear phonetically".  But with the mix of speech and music, it's not as clear as it could be.)

One of the most distinctive features of Quebec French is the pronunciation of French French [t] as [ts], but only before _ and .  It's interesting that the /t/ in question stands before  and that the other /t/'s in the song stand before vowels other than  and .

This all may be nothing more than a random variation within the norms of standard-German pronunciation of /tu/, but I would think gjuhetar's questions deserves more of an answer than just "German word-initial /t/ is aspirated".

Dan_


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## Hutschi

One problem is adjustment of hearing. 
There is a kind of filter - and filtering is one of the first steps of language acquisition.

May be I just do not hear this "ts" because my filter is adapted in another way.


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## berndf

Dan2 said:


> There are several word-initial /t/'s in this song and I hear them all as unremarkable except for the word "tu'" near the beginning, which I, like gjuhetar, hear as more than just an aspirated /t/. (If you native Germans disagree, I'd point out that it's sometimes easier for a non-native to "hear phonetically". But with the mix of speech and music, it's not as clear as it could be.)


I noticed this too. For me it was just a very forcefully pronounced aspirated "t". This may create a somewhat hissing sound as the airflow reaches a higher velocity at the edge of the teeth. But I still hear it as aspiration.


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## brian

Dan2 said:


> There are several word-initial /t/'s in this song and I hear them all as unremarkable except for the word "tu'" near the beginning, which I, like gjuhetar, hear as more than just an aspirated /t/.  (If you native Germans disagree, I'd point out that it's sometimes easier for a non-native to "hear phonetically".  But with the mix of speech and music, it's not as clear as it could be.)



I definitely hear an aspirated [t]. I do not hear [ts] at all.



			
				Dan2 said:
			
		

> One of the most distinctive features of Quebec French is the pronunciation of French French [t] as [ts], but only before _ and .  It's interesting that the /t/ in question stands before  and that the other /t/'s in the song stand before vowels other than  and ._


_

Careful! In Quebec French /t/ becomes [ts] before  and *[y]* (and their lax allophones [ɪ] and [ʏ], respectively), not before . More generally, /t/ becomes [ts] before high front vowels;  is a high back vowel, so the phenomenon does not occur. Hence:

tout /tu/ --> [tu]
tu /ty/ --> [tsy]

So the comparison doesn't really hold here, especially because in Quebec French the same phenomenon occurs with the voiced counterpart: /d/ --> [dz] before high front vowels. And yet in the song du is not pronounced [dzu]._


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## gjuhetar

Thank you guys for your kind and interesting comments. As Dan2 rightly put it, I know what aspiration is, but I find all those comments really helpful and insightful.

Although phonetically similar, I can perceive differences among /t/s in many languages, because /t/ in Germanic languages like German and English is voiceless *alveolar* plosive, while /t/ in Indian and Romance languages is voiceless *dental* plosive.

Furthermore, /t/ in *Danish* and some English varieties like *Liverpool* dialect is affricated, so that it is nearly [ts], which makes me think that some other Germanic languages may have similar phenomena.

As I have said above, I perceive phonetic differences, and that's why I might have even interpreted voiceless *alveolar plosive* as voiceless *alveolar affricate*.


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## Dan2

brian said:


> Careful! In Quebec French /t/ becomes [ts] before _ and *[y]* (and their lax allophones [ɪ] and [ʏ], respectively), not before ._


_
You're absolutely right.  I was careless; the affricativization occurs before spelled 'i' and 'u' whereas I wrote  and .  Thanks for "cleaning up after me".
The reference to French probably isn't relevant other than to show that there are indeed cases (Danish also) where [t] turns into an affricate.

As for the exact characterization of the /t/'s in the song, all I can say is that for me there is a distinct perceptual difference between the /t/ of "tu'" and those in "THX" and "BTW" later in the song.  (How one hears this may be partly a function of the audio characteristics of one's computer sound system.)_


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## brian

I won't comment on the perceptive aspect since that'll depend on several factors, as you've mentioned; but from a purely phonological standpoint, it would be odd to have /t/ --> [ts] without /d/ --> [dz]. Phonological phenomena like affrication affect particular consonants based on place of articulation rather than on voicing, so one would expect that if /t/ --> [ts] occurs, then so should /d/ --> [dz], provided the language has /d/.

Evidence for this, as mentioned above, would be Quebec French, but also languages that have /t/ --> [tʃ] and /d/ --> [dʒ] - another type of affrication.

Of course, it's certainly possible that in this particular song, at that particular instance, he does make a [ts] sound, but this would be a one-time _performance_ issue. After all, it's a song, not speech. But I highly doubt that there would be a dialect of German (or any language, for that matter) with /t/ --> [ts] in environment X _without_ /d/ --> [dz] in environment X. It would be very unexpected and unusual.


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## berndf

Careful. This depends on how a language does its fortis/lenis distinction. The OHG sound shift e.g. has /t/>/ts/ but not /d/>/dz/.


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## brian

Right, but I'm talking synchronically. I don't know enough about historical linguistics/phonological evolution/diachronic change to say much, really, but I have a feeling it's much more complex. For example:



> The High German consonant shift is a good example of a chain shift,  as was its predecessor, the first Germanic consonant shift. For  example, phases 1/2 left the language without a /t/ phoneme, as this had  shifted to /s/ or /ts/. Phase 3 filled this gap (d→t), but left a new  gap at /d/, which phase 4 then filled (þ→d).


(Source)

Could it be that, at any one particular time, there was only one /t/ (or /d/) phoneme, and that if [d] ([t], respectively) did exist in the language, then it was purely as an allophone of something? If so, then the affrication rule would only apply to the one phoneme, e.g. /t/.

What I mean, more generally, is that synchronic phonological rules are usually simple and indeed quite general, whereas diachronic rules are more complex; so they can't really be compared so easily.


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## Dan2

berndf said:


> Careful. This depends on how a language does its fortis/lenis distinction. The OHG sound shift e.g. has /t/>/ts/ but not /d/>/dz/.


Also, there are varieties of British English in which syllable-initial /t/'s are pronounced in a way that sounds very bizarre to my American ears.  As with the word in the German song, I'm not ready to claim that it's [ts], just that it's not the moderately aspirated /t/ that I'm accustomed to.

Maybe the Quebec affrication is unrelated to the Germanic (Brit Eng, Danish, maybe occasional German) observations.  The former affects _unaspirated_ /t/ (and d) before high front vowels, while the latter seems simply to be a strengthening of the aspiration that's already there (and thus affects /t/ but not /d/).


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## berndf

Dan2 said:


> As with the word in the German song, I'm not ready to claim that it's [ts], just that it's not the moderately aspirated /t/ that I'm accustomed to.


Nor am I. To give you another argument: There is a German word /tsu:/ which is spelled _zu_. If the /t/ in _tu'_ /tu:/ were changed to /ts/ then there should be a chance of confusion with _zu_. But there is absolutely none. The pronunciation of _tu'_ does not even remotely resemble that of _zu_.


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## Polyglotta

Mein Freund leitet eine Sprachschule in Tokio. Er hat mich einmal gefragt, was ich ihm bei der Einstellung von deutschen Sprachlehrern in Hinsicht auf die Aussprache für einen Standardempfehle. Ich habe ihm den Siebs aus dem Regal geholt und gesagt, Deutsch ist anders als z. B. Französich, insoweit die Orthoepik eigentlich künstlich ist: ein Kompromiss zwischen Norden und Süden. Als Studentin bin ich nebenbei für kurze Zeit in eine Schauspielschule gegangen, und dort hat man Leute, die Schbiel sagten, verbessert. Man musste auch, um den Unterschie zwischen _Sport_ und _Portwein_ zu erfühlen, bei der Aussprache ein Papiertaschentuch vor die Lippen halten. 
Ich selber spreche das "p" in Spiel etwa wie im Französischen: ohne jede Aspiration. Das "b" in Waschbär aber klingt wie das Pingyin "b" in _Beijing_ (北京)，also völlig ohne Muskelanspannung.   Das Duden-Aussprachewörterbuch scheint auch dieser Ansicht zu sein, obwohl die Notation nicht ganz klar ist.


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## Dan2

Dan2 said:


> As with the word in the German song, I'm not ready to claim that it's [ts]





berndf said:


> Nor am I. To give you another argument: There is a German word /tsu:/ which is spelled _zu_. If the /t/ in _tu'_ /tu:/ were changed to /ts/ then there should be a chance of confusion with _zu_. But there is absolutely none. The pronunciation of _tu'_ does not even remotely resemble that of _zu_.


I agree that comparing the word in question to "zu" is an entirely reasonable thing to do.  And I have absolutely no argument with your conclusion.

But there's an interesting point to be made in this context: Sounds have many dimensions on which they can vary, and lack of merger in the ears of the native speaker doesn't mean that a significant shift in a given direction isn't taking place.

An example from English:
Dictionaries show words like "Dan" and "jam" as having the low vowel [ae].  But foreigners often report they hear a mid vowel like [E] or [e] in these words in American speech.  Now I could try to refute this claim by saying (paraphrasing your response above), "if that were true, there would be the chance of confusing "Dan" with "den" [E] or "Dane" [e]; but there is absolutely none."

The foreigner is right that the vowel of "Dan" has moved to the [E]/[e] region and I'm right that "Dan", "den", and "Dane" are fully distinct (when I'm wearing my native-speaker hat, they don't even sound similar).  The resolution of this paradox is clear: yes, the core of all three vowels is mid, but between length, height within the "mid" region, and  diphtongization, there's plenty of room for three distinct vowels.  And if they're phonemically distinct, the native speaker will hear them as categorically different no matter how close they are in absolute phonetic terms.

Sometimes a merger does eventually take place, sometimes things move off in other directions.  Time will tell.


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## berndf

You are absolutely right. When constructing minimal pairs you have to be very careful not to overlook a different dimension of distinction. Your example made me smile a bit, though. Most foreigners probably wouldn't understand that there possibly could be an issue with "Dan" and "Dane". In most languages diphthongization is a much more prominent variation than changing vowel height. It is actually perplexing to many of us non-English speakers how little attention English speakers pay to diphthongization. When Americans say "entrée" they, of course, pronounce the "é" as [eI] and they usually don't even realize they pronounce it differently than the French. (in Geneva accent they actually pronounce it [ej] but that's a totally different issue).


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## berndf

Polyglotta said:


> Das Duden-Aussprachewörterbuch scheint auch dieser Ansicht zu sein, obwohl die Notation nicht ganz klar ist.


Hmmm. Ich bin in der Ferienwohnung und habe keinen Duden hier. Wie notiert er es denn? Normalerweise ist die Dudennotation so, dass phonemisch irrelevante Unterscheidungen nicht notiert werden, so schreibt er z.B. immer /r/ und unterscheidet nicht zwischen den verschiedenen "r"-Realisierungen im Deutschen.

Es gibt natürlich Akzente, die "sp" aspirieren, Rheinisch z.B. Wenn ich mich z.B. daran erinnere, wie Adenauer "Spiegel" ausgesprochen hat (Ein Witz aus der Zeit: "Ich möchte dem ausjeschiedenen Chollegen Strauss noch ein ernstes Worcht mit auf den Wech mitjeben, dass er sich des morjens von seiner Frau rasieren lassen soll, dass er de nicht mehr in den Spiejel zu gucken braucht"; so ganz hatte ich den Witz damals noch nicht verstanden; er ist mir aber trotzdem intensiv im Gedächtnis geblieben).


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## Polyglotta

Right. Therefore, it's not entirely clear how the Duden wants you to pronounce a certain word (phonetically). Thus, there is no indication of devoicing of /b/ (a small circle below the letter), but the initial explanation tells you that Sp- is not aspirated.

I can't remember that I spoke about aspiration of Sp-, I think I said that in my idiolect the "p" in _Spiel, Sport_ etc. is a very clear unaspirated fortis, whereas the "b" in _Waschbär_ is an unequivocal lenis. Nevertheless, I agree that a lot of people do not make this distinction, but in German we should have this artificial standard of the Bühnensprache. 
Again, one word about the "filter". I learned quite a lot of different languages and I have always encountered sounds I couldn`t hear correctly at the first attempt. When I heard the model pronunciation my Arabic teacher gave me I repeated "Ra", and she corrected me: I didn`t say this, I said "gha"; I heard a Russian recording which I was told to transcribe, but words I heard for the first time were often heard through this filter, like /c/ for /t/, and so forth. This is a filter our native languages provide us with. For a native speaker the distinction between "Dan is in the den" is absolutely no problem, but I think most Germans perceive 〔æ〕 and 〔ε〕 as more or less the same sound, whereas Japanese hear "Dan" as  /daN/ and den as /deN/, simply because there is only one /e/ in Japanese　and  〔æ〕is nearer to /a/ than to /e/.


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## berndf

Polyglotta said:


> I can't remember that I spoke about aspiration of Sp-, I think I said that in my idiolect the "p" in _Spiel, Sport_ etc. is a very clear unaspirated fortis, whereas the "b" in _Waschbär_ is an unequivocal lenis.


 Then I don't fully understand what you meant. With German plosives, presence or absence of aspiration defined _fortis _and _lenis_.





Polyglotta said:


> Nevertheless, I agree that a lot of people do not make this distinction, but in German we should have this artificial standard of the Bühnensprache.


I am not one of those people who say that stage pronunciation is irrelevant today but I very much doubt it still serves as a useful definition of the term _Standard German_. In the days of Siebs, _Standard German_ was essentially a fiction maintained by a very tiny elite but today it is a living reality with its own dynamics and it is certainly not the same language Siebs described in 1898.


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## berndf

brian said:


> Right, but I'm talking synchronically. I don't know enough about historical linguistics/phonological evolution/diachronic change to say much, really, but I have a feeling it's much more complex. For example:
> 
> (Source)
> 
> Could it be that, at any one particular time, there was only one /t/ (or /d/) phoneme, and that if [d] ([t], respectively) did exist in the language, then it was purely as an allophone of something? If so, then the affrication rule would only apply to the one phoneme, e.g. /t/.
> 
> What I mean, more generally, is that synchronic phonological rules are usually simple and indeed quite general, whereas diachronic rules are more complex; so they can't really be compared so easily.


Also synchronic phenomena usually have a diachronic reason.

To stay with the example: If we contrast modern German dialects we find [t] vs. [ts.] in High vs. Low German dialects but [d] vs. [d]. E.g. Standard German "zu" is [tsu:] in most High German and [toʊ] in most Low German dialects while Standard German "du" is [du:] in High German and [doʊ] in Low German. (And in case you wonder: Yes, Low German also tends to glide long close-mid vowels like English does.)


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