Do Germans have a long convoluted word for when somebody asks something and you first say "What?" but then immediately answer their question anyway as if your mouth was quicker than your brain?
5 days ago by LouNeko to c/asklemmy
Mostly true, but in standard German one would normally vocalize "Schlafsack" without any audible pause between the f and the s.
If you were to pronounce "Schlaf sack", there would generally be an expectation of a glottal stop an audible stop between the f and the s (dialects excluded).
So while, yes, compound words in German are written without spaces, that's not just a writing difference.
This is the same in English between "sleeping" and "bag". The pronunciation of "ing ba" in "sleeping bag" is exactly the same as the pronunciation of "ingba" in "dingbat".
In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there's no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, "brauner Sack" between the two words.
I think people are surprised to hear this, so one explanation for what you wrote is that you genuinely believe in speech there is generally a tiny pause between words, that you don't find within words. It's difficult to find a good citation for this because it's a fairly basic fact in linguistics, in spite of how surprising it may be; the best I came up with was this Duolingo post
But you may already be aware of that and be getting at something else: in German, "Schlafsack" is a word that will be understood by anyone if you say it in the normal way. To get someone to understand that you're saying the two words "Schlaf Sack" next to one another without understanding "Schlafsack", you need to do something to make it clear, otherwise they'll understand the normal word. And one way to do that would be to insert a tiny gap. This is different though: in English if you wanted someone to understand "sleeping bag" not as the thing you use while camping but, perhaps, an anthropomorphic bag that is having a nap, you need to employ something similar. So this is not a difference between the languages.
In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.
At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear the glottal stop a stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. There's a reason why it's in the IPA. It's also e.g. the basis for the "gender not-really-neutral" dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).
Paradoxically, non-native speakers tend to be better at analysing this kind of thing ;) German for sure does not have a glottal stop between most words. "Das Kind" is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.
I'm not sure if I've misunderstood you and this isn't what you're saying happens...
“Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.
It absolutely is /dasʔkınt/ in the standard German I've grown up with. I've never heard ~~anyone any native speaker pronounce it as /daskınt/.~~
Can you find a recording (not necessarily of someone saying "das kind", but of any two words, the first ending and the second beginning with a consonant) where you can hear this glottal stop put in between? It should come from flowing speech, not the boundary of a clause or sentence where the speaker might insert an extra pause, of course. If you want to record yourself demonstrating it, that would be perfect but I appreciate you may not want to.
Ideally also a recording of as much of the same sequence of sounds without it, for comparison, but that's less important :)
edit: realised I could give you an example myself. Here's a recording from Wiktionary, a native speaker saying "aus Kindern werden Leute". There is no glottal stop between any of the words.
And while finding that I realised there is a point from the other direction: in precise speech, there is a glottal stop in German compounds where the second part starts with a vowel sound. So Spiegelei is listed in the Duden as having a glottal stop before the "Ei".
If you provide storage to upload four audio .wav files (each about 400 KiB), I can send you samples generated by me speaking, then cloned with w-okada using a generic voice I believe is freely usable. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough for me to clearly tell which is which just by listening.
I don't know of anywhere suitable, sorry. Also if you are not comfortable sharing your own voice (which I perfectly understand, I also would not want to) I don't think a voice changer is the way to go.
Maybe we will have to leave that thread here then - I also understand if you don't want to go digging for examples. I would be interested to know still if you hear the glottal stops you're talking about in the example above, though?
Generalising the Spiegelei example: in order to read a word in a language which writes its compounds without spaces, you need to be able to break words down into their compounds correctly. Just reading the letters, with no knowledge of vocabulary, "Gewinnspiel" could be analysed in at least two ways: "Gewinns·piel" or "Gewinn·spiel". The "s" would be pronounced differently between the two analyses (respectively as a /z/ or a /ʃ/ following regular German pronunciation rules).
Fun stuff!
I would be interested to know still if you hear the glottal stops you’re talking about in the example above, though?
In the voice changed output for "Das Kind"? It's not perfect, but yes. If you're interested in the "biomechanics": It's the difference between a miniscule stopping of the continuous exhalation from your mouth for the s before starting a new burst exhalation for the k vs doing both as part of the same single exhalation that directly changes from continuous to burst.
Yes, there's a stop of exhalation between the s and the K. If there wasn't, it would sound more like the sk of the English word sky instead.
EDIT: He does not, however, stop between Kindern and werden and not between werden and Leute, which does sound weird to me. Less like standard German and more like a dialect.
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German compound nouns are just written without spaces. There's no grammatical difference between "Schlafsack" (= Schlaf "sleep" + Sack "bag") and "sleeping bag", except the way they're written down. In English we analyse a "word" as "a thing you write down with spaces on either side", which is valid as a definition or as an analysis, but it's not what we really think of when we talk about words, which we think of as something more fundamental.
If, tomorrow, we decided in English to write compound nouns without spaces, the language would have suddenly gained thousands and thousands of words, yet the only real difference would be a rule about writing things down. Spoken English would be exactly the same, so nothing fundamental about the actual bits of English would have changed.
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