Whose German? Theach/ichalternation and related phenomena in “standard” and “colloquial.” By Orrin W. Robinson. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 208.) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xii, 169. Hardcover. $64.00

Extract

One might think that after seventy-plus years of debating the phonological status of the velar versus palatal fricative in German (the “ach-Laut” and the “ich-Laut” respectively), nothing new could be said about it. The monograph under review shows why this is not the case. And nowhere will one find a more exhaustive historical overview of the various positions taken since 1929, when Daniel Jones first treated the question (he writes of it, however, as a bit of common knowledge among linguists). From Jones to the latest views from Optimality Theory, the reader is skillfully guided through the various questions this issue has raised: Is this one phoneme or two? Is morphological information included or not? Are boundary phenomena included or not? Is /x/ underlying or /ç/? Is -chen a “phonological word” or are there in fact two different suffixes? To what extent should loanwords be brought into the discussion? And there are other issues, too, which have not been raised before, especially the one posed in the title. Thus, every possible question raised about these two sounds and every conceivable answer is given its due; this comprehensive survey makes up the whole of chapter 3. The first two chapters clear the ground for this history of the discussion: Chapter 1 deals with the issue of the definition of “Standard German”, and chapter 2 deals with the “bare facts” regarding the distribution of [x] and [ç].