Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
При чём здесь Шотландия?
Bitpicker, have you read my question? Is his "l" in loch hard or soft? It must be hard.
Oh, I didn't realize you were interested in the /l/ sound. Trouble is, the distinction hard / soft is pretty meaningless to me as a native speaker of German, there is nothing intrinsically hard or soft about them. We speakers of German tend to mistake "hard" vs. "soft" for "voiceless" vs. "voiced", which is wrong, but the distinction "hard" vs. "soft" makes no more sense to us as if you called them "sweet" vs. "sour". "Palatized" is a better description than "soft".

Now the trouble is that my native German does not know any distinction here, I'm more or less deaf to the difference. In English there are different /l/ sounds but they do not distinguish meaning. There are different /l/ sounds in the words "bill" and "laugh", but they do not carry meaning; the sound is determined by the position of the phoneme, there is no word "bill" with the l-sound of "laugh" and vice versa.

However, in the Gaelic languages palatalization also exists and differentiates meaning as it does in Russian. So a speaker of a Gaelic language might palatize the L in Loch intentionally. Loch is a Scottish Gaelic word meaning "lake", that's why I mentioned Scotland.