[kaffe] A small question:how can I pronounce the "kaffe"?

[Sven de Marothy]

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 02:00 +0100, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Thanks for the question!
> 
> Given that Tim Wilkinson began writing Kaffe while he was in Sweden, it 
> should sound like the swedish word 'Kaffe'. Which, according to my not v 
> ery extensive google searching sounds like this:
> 
> http://www.pessie.net/ljud3/kaffe.wav
> 

Ah yes, that sounds good. Typical standard swedish, as it's spoken in
the middle of the country, without any particular dialect. Note the
melody of the word, with a slight upwards intonation of the second
syllable. (This changes however, depending on where you put the word in
a sentence. Which is the single most difficult thing about Swedish.) 

But apart from that, Swedish is in general close to German
pronounciation. The 'a' sound is more from the throat than in english.
Both the 'a' and the 'e' sounds are short. 
(A vowel followed by a double consonant ('ff') is _short_ in Swedish,
which is the opposite situation to English and Russian)

And if you hadn't guessed that already, 'kaffe' means 'coffee'. :)

/Sven