Abstract
Danish, like closely related Swedish and Norwegian, has descended from Old Norse (Haugen 1976). While the three contemporary languages are variably mutually intelligible, Danish has phonologically diverged from the other Scandinavian languages (Gooskens 2006). This is caused by extensive consonant lenition and vowel reduction within Danish (Basbøll 2005). The lenition of <t> and <d> in syllable coda positions into a sound that Danish linguists have called soft-d is seemingly unique to the Danish. In most phonological descriptions, it is transcribed using the phonetic symbol /ð/, a voiced interdental fricative. We assert that this is not accurate; not all phonologists agree that the soft-d is a fricative. Some describe it as an alveolar semi-vowel (Haberland 1994), while others transcribe it as a velarized, retracted, and lowered alveolar approximant (Basbøll 2005). Many observe that the sound resembles lateral /l/, a distinct phoneme of Danish (Wells, 2010). Through acoustic analysis of tokens taken from the DanPASS corpus (Grønnum 2016) we show that the acoustic properties (HNR) of soft-d are indeed not the same as a fricative, but rather that of an approximant or vowel. Therefore, the use of /ð/ to transcribe this symbol is inaccurate and does not align with the goals of the International Phonetic Association.
Highlights
Danish is a Germanic language spoken in Denmark
One of the Scandinavian languages, it is descended from Old Norse and its sister languages include Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese
The linguistic factors include numerous phonological changes that the language has undergone in the past couple of centuries that have caused it to drift from its sisters to the north: (1) vowel reduction, (2) adoption of a uvular pronunciation, and (3) lenition of and
Summary
1994), alveopalatal approximant (Grønnum 1998), and a velarized, retracted, lowered alveolar approximant (Basbøll 2005) These variations in descriptions put forward by linguists are mirrored in the way that they choose to transcribe the sound. While the convention in place is to transcribe words containing soft d with /ð/, other linguists have chosen to embellish this symbol with a variety of diacritics in an attempt to modify a simple voiced interdental fricative into something more attuned to their approximant- or semi-vowel-like descriptions. More contemporary descriptions of this sound have suggested that the sound may be closer to an approximant, which is similar to the research trajectory in Spanish lenition studies We feel that this is evidence to support that soft d might be an approximant. This paper will relate the acoustic characteristics of this sound and describe issues with the current practice of its transcription and offer a possible way to approach this problem
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