In 1913, Anton Pfalz described a specific relation of vowel and consonant
sequences for East Middle Bavarian dialects, located in the eastern
parts of Austria. According to his observations, a long vowel is always
followed by a lenis consonant, and a short vowel is always followed
by a fortis consonant. Consequently, vowel duration depends on the
quality of the following consonant. Phonetic examinations of what became
to be known as the Pfalz’s Law yielded different results. Specifically,
the occurrence of a third category, namely a long vowel followed by
a fortis consonant, seems to be firmly embedded in East Middle Bavarian.
Up till now, phonetic examinations concentrated on CVCV sequences.
The analysis of monosyllables and of sequences including consonant
clusters has been largely neglected so far. In the present contribution,
we analyse the impact of initial and final consonant clusters in monosyllables
on the assumed relationship of vowel + consonant sequences. Thus, we
included 18 speakers from three Bavarian varieties. The results show
that in all examined varieties long vowel + fortis consonants occur
and that the cluster complexity has no influence on the absolute vowel
duration, contradicting Pfalz’s Law.
Cite as: Klingler, N., Moosmüller, S., Scheutz, H. (2017) Vowel and Consonant Sequences in three Bavarian Dialects of Austria. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 2983-2987, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1154
@inproceedings{klingler17_interspeech, author={Nicola Klingler and Sylvia Moosmüller and Hannes Scheutz}, title={{Vowel and Consonant Sequences in three Bavarian Dialects of Austria}}, year=2017, booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017}, pages={2983--2987}, doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1154} }