Bavarian Dialect Research Articles

Bajor utcanevek egy magyarországi német településen

This paper examines names for squares, streets (many of which led to neighbouring settlements) and alleys in the historical centre of the Hungarian town called Pilisvörösvár (Pest County), given, in the local Bavarian dialect, by Swabian and Bavarian settlers, who populated the place until the middle of the 18th century. The author briefly describes the local German minority, the main features of the Bavarian dialect, as well as the onomastic corpus with respect to the phonetic, morphological, lexical and functional-semantic characteristics of the names. Linguistic analysis is completed with the discussion of how the observed names of Bavarian origin were formed, focusing especially on the historical and socio-cultural factors that played a crucial role in name formation. The Bavarian names for public places were transmitted orally in the local community until the turn of the millennium. Revitalization of the names started in 2009, as a result of which the Bavarian street names on blue and white local history plaques have been placed under the official Hungarian street signs. The last section of the paper presents the steps of this revitalization process.

Liquid Dissimilation in Bavarian German

The present study investigates the instability of adjacent liquids in a variety of Southern Bavarian German. The focus is a synchronic process converting /r/ to [d] before or after /l/—a process argued to involve a dissimilation of the phonological feature [liquid], which itself is triggered by a specific OCP constraint, *[liquid][liquid]. In addition to providing evidence for the feature [liquid], the present article also supports a model of segment structure in which the traditional feature [sonorant] is replaced with the privative node [Sonorant Voice] (SV). The Bavarian dialect also displays a number of OCP-motivated constraints that ban other sequences of identical manner features, namely, [continuant], [nasal], [strident].*

“Serving the Whole”: An Interview with Ottawa Playwright Peter Froehlich

Two weeks before rehearsals began, Peter Froehlich (Merz; Hank Williams, the Show He Never Gave; The Beaten Track) and I discussed the ways in which his new play presents representational challenges for the playwright/actor/professor. For one, the work adapts diverse “sketches” by Munich beer-hall sensation Karl Valentin and weaves them through moments in his life. For another, the sketches are translated into English from a difficult Bavarian dialect. For another, the play was going into rehearsals while Ottawa considered slashing four-fifths of its municipal arts funding – a proposal that would have decimated English-speaking professional theatre organizations in the city. Froehlich’s project interrogates how “we” translate a/political art across the very spatial and temporal borders that connect us to, Froehlich maintains, “one of the most important narratives of the way we put the world together.”

Ethical principles for ageing and Alzheimer's disease in mount athos

The Bavarian J. A. Schmeller hoped that the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi would appoint him as a teacher. When this failed, he joined the Swiss military in Spanish services carrying out Pestalozzi's principles at military schools by teaching languages in Tarragona and Madrid, and, finally, at a private teaching institute in Basle. He was inspired by the Swiss dialect dictionary when he decided to make a Bavarian dialect dictionary and, based on this, a Bavarian dialect grammar. This was the beginning of German scientific dialectology. He was appointed member of the Bavarian Academy of Science and professor at Munich university. As curator of the Royal Court and State Library (1829) he was to systematize about 25 000 handwritten documents confiscated when 150 monasteries were secularized in 1803. Along with the Grimm brothers and Karl Lachmann, Schmeller was a famous editor of medieval texts.

The phonology of Upper Bavarian — some observations

C. E. Capell's article ‘Transcription, Vowel and Consonant Systems of Upper Bavarian Dialect’, in JIPA, vol. 9, no. 1 (June 1979), was interesting as being one of the very few contributions in English to the study of this phonologically fascinating German dialect, but was unfortunately so full of straightforward errors of data and interpretation that it gravely misrepresents the dialect. The following article is an attempt to set the record straight in all but a few very minor points.

Perceptual dimension of openness in vowels.

The role of intrinsic factors determining perceived degree of vowel openness was examined. In order to determine the role of F1 and F0, one-formant vowels, covering a wide range of fundamental and formant frequencies, were identified by 23 subjects who were native speakers of a Bavarian dialect in which five degrees of openness occur distinctively. The significance of intrinsic factors other than F1 and F0 was also studied using synthetic versions of natural vowels with F1 and/or F0 systematically displaced in frequency. It was found that, generally, the tonality distance between F1 and F0 is decisive for openness, while the higher formants contribute marginally. It was further found that the distance between widely spaced formants, as between F2 and F1 in front vowels, is not crucial for vowel identification. The results are evaluated in terms of a psychoacoustic model of identification by pattern matching. the model incorporates two basic assumptions. First, a certain pattern of excitation along the basilar membrane is recognized as a given feature regardless of position along the membrane. Second, there is an integration band with a width of 3 Bark effective in spectrum envelope recognition.

Transcription, vowel and consonant systems of Upper Bavarian dialect

Informants recorded a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, adapted from the North German Variety in the I.P.A. Principles (1973). The German text was rewritten with considerable emphasis on lexical differences, and only slightly less emphasis on morphological and syntactic differences, especially word order. Words such as Wanderer in High German (hereinafter H.G.) were regarded as ‘non-Bavarian’ by native speakers and virtually all examples of the imperfect tense were changed to the perfect tense. It is usual in this dialect, which is normally known as Upper Bavarian (hereinafter U.B.), for personal pronouns to follow verb forms, as a result of which they are very rarely stressed.