Austria 1

Listen to Austria 1, a 60-year-old man from Vienna, Austria. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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Please note: This subject does not read scripted speech.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 60

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1940

PLACE OF BIRTH: Berlin, Germany (but raised in Vienna)

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Austrian

OCCUPATION: medical doctor

EDUCATION: post-graduate school

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject was born in Berlin, Germany, but was raised in Vienna. He lived in Innsbruck, Austria, and also in Québec, Canada, for three years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

His lower-grade schooling was at an elite school in Vienna. Over the years, he has deliberately minimized the accent that was attached to that school. He says that his accent is essentially Viennese, but educated people in Innsbruck think he is from Salzburg, so he believes he has picked up a bit of the Tirol accent in Innsbruck.

RECORDED BY: Pat Toole

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I had had, uh, two years of ancient Greek in school. I had the idea to use my holidays … to travel to Greece … and see … and look for myself the things that I had been taught. In preparation for the trip, I hired … quotation marks “a Greek student” to help me with the pronunciation of modern Greek, and to my big surprise … this was not all that difficult. So after having prepared for three months, I hitchhiked down the coast of Italy, took the boat over to Greece, stayed in Athens … and had the great idea … to … do the marathon, but backwards, by hiking from Athens to Marathon … because the mountain, on this. Uh, daring enterprise, I had a problem, I lost, somewhere I lost my way and ended up at the coast at the place where Iphigenia — Iphigenia had uh … had been sacrificed when the Greeks went to Troy. At this place, there’s a chapel now-a-days, dedicated to St. George, and met a fellow who was tending the fields there. I stayed with him overnight, and then he had to go to town, for one or two days, to collect some things. In the evening of this day, I realized that I was low on food, I had a can of sardines but I had no more bread, and as the evening, as dawn–er, er–as the night–as the eve–as the day vanished, I realized I had to do something because I was hungry. And finally there was a group of shepherds coming with their flock … and, they passed me by and after some hesitation I asked them for bread. And they were very sorry; they had no bread with them, but invited me to go along with them to their hut. So, that’s what I did. And I trotted … beside them and talked to them, and the sheep were all around, and it went up and down little hills, and descending into little valleys, and they were filled with the fragrance of the … southern … herbs, like rosemary and other citrus, and I was tired, so the trot altogether had a very, dreamy effect on me, and the balmy air and these depressions and was like [unclear] the sheep trotting to the ground, and the dust getting into the air, and the last rays of the sun, and this dust it was like, out of this world. Then we ended up at the hut, which was a stone hut, a very primitive stone hut; they were very sorry that they were not able to feed me right away because they had to take care of the sheep, to milk the sheep, to push them into a sort of corral made up of thorny wheat pulled together like a fence, and I sat at the corner of the house and felt the warmth of the stove, felt the reflection of the sun, and sort of fell asleep, being tired and hungry. Then they got me to the house, they had an oil light, they had wooden — wooden bowls, and gave me some cheese and some milk and some bread. They were very sorry that they couldn’t go for me meat, they felt it was a — sort of the — as if they would owe me anything, and then I want — I was very grateful and was satiated and felt well enough to go home to my sleeping bag, but they didn’t want to let me go because some of the cisterns in the area didn’t have a cover, so they were afraid that I could slip and fall into one of the cisterns and hurt myself. They made my stay. And they gave me a bed, and the bed was … made up of wooden frames with uh, with leath-leather straps uh, woven into, instead of, uh — yeah, woven into a, into a net, and on that there was uh [clears throat] furs … fur, goatskin, and then it was covered a rough-rough — I don’t know — goatskin blanket or something … and fell asl–fell asleep — I fell asleep; it was very soft.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Faith Harvey (emendations by Paul Meier)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/03/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Many of the most significant pronunciation changes occur in consonants. The “s” sound is usually transposed into a “z” sound, as in “use,” “years,” “price” and “also.” The voiceless consonant in “mouth” and “thought” is sounded as an “s.” The voiced consonant in “with” is a “z,” and the same consonant in “leather,” “them” and “this” becomes a “d.” He makes no such substitutions in the words “Athens” and “marathon.” The “d” in words like “hired,” “stayed,” “did” and “food” is replaced by a “t.” The “v” in “give” and “lived” is replaced with an “f.” The consonant sound in “judge” is replaced by the sound in “church.” This is heard in his pronunciation of “German” and “George.” Note the intrusive “g” that follows the “ing” sound in “evening.” We hear the uvular “r” in “real” and “Troy.” The vowel in “sat,” “can’t,” “had,” “blanket” and “bag” is replaced by a higher front vowel. Lastly, the vowel in “passed” and “Mary” is the “a” of the “ask list.”

COMMENTARY BY: Pat Toole

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 08/2000

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