Final-obstruent devoicing
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Sound change and alternation |
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Fortition |
Dissimilation |
Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic
Languages with final-obstruent devoicing
Germanic languages
Most modern continental West Germanic languages developed final devoicing, the earliest evidence appearing in Old Dutch around the 9th or 10th century.
- Afrikaans
- Luxembourgish and Ripuarian)
- Dutch, also Old and Middle Dutch
- (High) German, also Middle High German[2]
- Gothic (for fricatives)
- Limburgish
- Low German, also Middle Low German
- Old English(for fricatives, inconsistently for /ɣ/)
- West Frisian.[3] In contrast, North Frisian (and some Low German dialects in North Frisia influenced by it) do not have final devoicing.
In contrast to other continental West Germanic languages, (Eastern)-
Of the North Germanic languages, Norwegian and Swedish do not have final devoicing, whereas Danish does not even have voiced obstruents that could be devoiced. As in Danish, Icelandic stops are voiceless, but it has voiced fricatives which may also occur word-finally.
Gothic (an East Germanic language) also developed final devoicing independently.
Romance languages
Among the
- Catalan
- [ɡʁɑ̃t] vs. grande [ɡʁɑ̃d(ə)], but now often grammaticalized)
- Friulian
- Lombard
- Occitan
- Romansh
- Walloon
Notes:
- Standard French (by final schwa losses, see above for notes) and Romanian do not have productive synchronic final devoicing, but varieties of French with substrates of Occitan, Catalan and Québécois (and other final devoicing languages) do have it.
- Other Romance languages such as Italian rarely have words with final voiced consonants for different reasons in their phonological histories, but borrowings from English into Italian that have a voiced final consonant (such as weekend) are not devoiced.
- Portuguese merges [s] and [z] in word-final position (nós and noz are homophones) but has a few words ending with voiced stops like sob (although some dialects feature an epenthetic vowel after the final consonant).
Slavic languages
Most
- Belarusian
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Macedonian
- Polish
- Russian
- Rusyn
- Kajkaviandialects)
- Slovak
- Slovene
- Sorbian
Other Indo-European languages
- Albanian – certain dialects, notably the dialects of certain areas of the Berati and Korça counties
- Arbëresh
- Breton
- Latgalian
- Lithuanian
- Yaghnobi
Non-Indo-European languages
- Azerbaijani (half-voiced in Iranian Azerbaijan)[4]
- Georgian (for stops)
- Indonesian (for stops)[5]
- Kalmyk (for stops)
- Khmer
- Korean (nuanced; see Korean phonology)
- Livonian (fully devoiced or half-voiced)[6]
- Lao
- Malaysian(for stops)
- Maltese
- Modern Javanese (for stops)
- Mongolian[citation needed]
- Thai
- Tok Pisin
- stops, partially)
Notes:
- Uralic languagewhich lies geographically between Germanic- and Slavic- speaking areas, does not have it.
Examples
Dutch and Afrikaans
In Dutch and Afrikaans, terminal devoicing results in homophones such as hard 'hard' and hart 'heart' as well as differences in consonant sounds between the singular and plural forms of nouns, for example golf–golven (Dutch) and golf–golwe (Afrikaans) for 'wave–waves'.
The history of the devoicing phenomenon within the West Germanic languages is not entirely clear, but the discovery of a runic inscription from the early fifth century suggests that this terminal devoicing[7] originated in Frankish. Of the old West Germanic languages, Old Dutch, a descendant of Frankish, is the earliest to show any kind of devoicing, and final devoicing also occurred in Frankish-influenced Old French.
Amelands, spoken on the Wadden Sea island of Ameland, is the only Dutch dialect that does not feature final-obstruent devoicing.[8]
English
Standard varieties of
Old English had final devoicing of /v/, although the spelling did not distinguish [f] and [v]. It can be inferred from the modern pronunciation of half with a voiceless /f/, from an originally voiced fricative [β] in Proto-Germanic *halbaz (preserved in German halb and Gothic halba). There was also final devoicing of [ɣ] to [x] finally, evidenced by spellings like burh alongside burg.
German
Final-obstruents devoicing occurs in the varieties from Northern Germany.
Some examples from Northern German include:
Nouns/adjective | Verbs | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Singular | Translation | Plural | Imperative | Translation | Infinitive |
Bad [baːt] | bath | Bäder [ˈbɛːdɐ] | red! [ʁeːt] | talk! | reden [ˈʁeːdn̩] |
Raub [ʁaʊ̯p] | robbery | Raube [ˈʁaʊ̯bə] | reib! [ʁaɪ̯p] | rub! | reiben [ˈʁaɪ̯bn̩] |
Zug [t͡suːk] | train | Züge [ˈt͡syːɡə] | sag! [zaːk] | say! | sagen [ˈzaːɡn̩] |
Archiv [ʔaɐ̯ˈçiːf] | archive | Archive [ʔaɐ̯ˈçiːvə] | |||
Maus [maʊ̯s] | mouse | Mäuse [ˈmɔʏ̯zə] | lies! [liːs] | read! | lesen [ˈleːzn̩] |
orange [ʔoˈʁaŋʃ] | orange (adj./n.) | Orange [ʔoˈʀaŋʒə] | manage! [ˈmɛnətʃ] | manage! | managen [ˈmɛnədʒən] |
Russian
Final-obstruent devoicing can lead to the
The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into -off (Russian: -ов), especially by the French, as well as older English transcriptions.
Devoicing in compounds
In compounds, the behaviour varies between languages:
- In some languages, devoicing is lexicalized, which means that words that are devoiced in isolation retain that final devoicing when they are part of a compound. In English, for example, there is an alternation between voiced and voiceless fricatives in pairs such as the following:
- thief ([f]) – thieve ([v])
- bath ([θ]) – bathe ([ð])
The process is not productive in English, however; see article Consonant voicing and devoicing.
- In other languages, it is purely phonological, which means that voicing depends solely on position and on assimilation with adjacent consonants. Example: German.
Notes
- ^ See Crowley and Bowern (2010), p. 24
- ^ In normalised Middle High German as opposed to modern New High German, devoicing is represented in writing, thus Kriemhilt is the shortened form of Kriemhilde.
- ISBN 978-3-484-73048-9.
- S2CID 232347049.
- ISBN 978-6232212350.
- . Retrieved March 13, 2022.
- ISBN 978-90-420-1579-1.
- ISBN 3-484-73048-X
- S2CID 7684083.
- ^ Ammon et al. 2004, p. lvii.
- ISBN 0-19-824040-6.
References
- Ammon, Ulrich; Bickel, Hans; et al., eds. (2004). Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3110165759.
- Brockhaus, Wiebke. (1995). Final Devoicing in the Phonology of German. Max Niemeyer.
- Chow, Daryl; Kharlamov, Viktor (September 2018). "Final devoicing in Singapore English". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 144 (3): 1902. S2CID 125369723.
- Dmitrieva, Olga (October 2014). "Final voicing and devoicing in American English". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 136 (4): 2174. .
- Grijzenhout, Janet (2000). "Voicing and devoicing in English, German, and Dutch: Evidence for domain-specific identity constraints". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.141.5510.
- ISBN 0195365542
See also
External links
- Final Devoicing or 'Why does <naoi> sound like <naoich>?' – explanation of devoicing with regard to Scottish Gaelic
- Final Devoicing – extract (with illustrative audio clips) from Peter Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics
- Final Devoicing Archived 2005-03-26 at the Wayback Machine – from The Talking Map | Tips for pronunciation