Where are these Danish sounds in IPA?

Question

I worked with a native Danish translator, using a simplified version of IPA for transcribing Danish words into their pronunciation. They pointed out 3 sounds that weren't covered by the system (which was based on IPA), so I am wondering where in IPA these sounds are that I missed.

• Blade. The "d" is pronounced like a halfway /l/ and /ð/.
• Kage. "e sound sounds like ø (in Danish) but not fully" they said. "The breathy part is in the beginning. It's like when you get hit in the belly, and try to talk."
• Måle. Same "e" sounding situation.
• mand/mænd. were both transcribed as "mAn", where "A" is like in "cat", but that was because of a limitation of the system. They said æ is a different sound from "cat". Even though /æ/ in IPA is the "cat" sound. Words like æble don't sound like "cat", more like /e/, but still it was said to be a different sound to the translators native ear.

The question is, what is the correct IPA for these 3 sounds, the "d" in "blade", the "e" in "kage", and the "æ" in "mænd" or "æble"?

Answer 1

There are quite a few conventions for transcription of Danish, and none of them correspond exactly to the standard IPA because (without employing a ton of diacritics) the IPA doesn't provide enough letters. Wikipedia has a comparison of some of the conventions here, and a description of underlying phonological units and corresponding allophones here.

• Blade. The "d" is pronounced like a halfway /l/ and /ð/.

This sound is transcribed with "ð" by almost all conventions. It's been described as a "velarized laminal alveolar approximant". A narrow transcription in the standard IPA is [ð̠˕ˠ], or even more narrowly, [ð̻˗˕ˠ].

• Kage. "e sound sounds like ø (in Danish) but not fully" they said. "The breathy part is in the beginning. It's like when you get hit in the belly, and try to talk."
• Måle. Same "e" sounding situation.

Kage underlyingly has /jə/, which is now commonly realized as [ɪ]. So the sound in måle is not the same actually.

The sound in måle is transcribed with "ə" by almost all conventions. The actual quality may vary, which is expected given it's a reduced vowel. My impression is that it's higher than English /ə/ in the same position (as in sofa) - which is phonetically near [ɐ] - much like German [ə] and is pretty brief; it sounds to me pretty much like the release of a final consonant in French (compare e.g. mål and måle). So the superscript "ᵊ" may be a handy way to denote the brevity and possible variability. In addition, the schwa here may be fused with /l/ through a process known as schwa-assimilation, resulting in a syllabic consonant, [l̩].

• mand/mænd. were both transcribed as "mAn", where "A" is like in "cat", but that was because of a limitation of the system. They said æ is a different sound from "cat". Even though /æ/ in IPA is the "cat" sound. Words like æble don't sound like "cat", more like /e/, but still it was said to be a different sound to the translators native ear.

Your informant likely isn't referring to [æ] in standard IPA but to æ in Dania transcription, or [æ] in "normalized" IPA, which is used in Danish books to describe the language but differs significantly from the standard IPA. The sound in mænd and æble is transcribed with æ in Dania and [ɛ] in the normalized IPA and is close to [e] in standard IPA (it's long in æble, by the way). (Normalized [æ] is closer to [ɛ] in standard IPA.) The sound in mand is close to [æ] in standard IPA and is transcribed with a in Dania and [a] in normalized IPA. Again, see the comparison on Wikipedia.

Answer 2

Regarding blade, kage and måle, I have nothing to add to Nardog’s answer, except to note that among younger speakers, the schwa-assimilation that takes place in kage is more likely to yield what would in standard IPA be transcribed as [ˈɡ̊ʰæ̝ː.æ̝], with the schwa assimilating completely to the preceding vowel. (And also to add that your informant’s description of a simple schwa, requiring belly punches and whatnot, is somewhat fanciful!)

Regarding mand and mænd, a bit of clarification to Nardog’s answer seems in order.

To begin with, if mand and mænd are transcribed with the same vowel, then the system is quite unequivocally wrong, because these are two entirely different vowels.

As Nardog mentions, there are various conventions for transcribing Danish, some of which go against each other. For present purposes, there are four main varieties to deal with: Dania; standard IPA; the ‘normalised’ IPA used, mostly phonemically, in Danish works (such as those by Basbøll and Grønnum, and also in reference works like DDO); and Wikipedia’s ‘IPA for Danish’.

The vowel in mand is [a̝] in fairly narrow standard IPA – that is, it is somewhere in between IPA [a] and [æ]. This sound is transcribed [a] in both Dania and ‘normalised’ IPA, but Wikipedia opts for [æ]. This is the basic Danish vowel that comes closest to the (British) English CAT vowel, standard IPA [a].¹

The vowel in mænd is [e] or [e̞] in narrow standard IPA – that is, it is just a tiny bit lower than standard IPA [e], but not much. In Dania, this is transcribed [æ], while ‘normalised’ IPA uses [ε] and Wikipedia uses [e]. This is the basic Danish vowel that comes closest to the (American) English LET vowel.²

The vowel in æble is the same underlying phoneme as in mænd, except long: phonemically, it’s /εː/, and it’s generally transcribed as just the long counterpart to /ε/. Phonetically, it tends to be slightly more open than its short counterpart, between [e̞ː] and [ε̝ː].

 

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Notes

^{1 There is a Danish vowel that is narrowly transcribed as standard IPA [a], but it’s not phonemic: it’s the allophone of the phoneme /ε/ (the vowel in mænd, see above) which is found after /r/.}

^{2 For some older speakers, the allophone of /ɛː/ found after /r/ can actually come closer to the LET vowel than this one does, but in most younger people, that allophone has shifted and become much more open and retracted, to the point that many now pronounce it more like [æ̠ː]. And of course, unlike the LET vowel, this allophone is inherently long.}

Answer 3

The best way to approach this problem is to get Hans Basbøll's The Phonology of Danish: he provides good IPA transcriptions of various degrees of minuteness along with spelling.