Re: CHAT: affricates/grammar help/intransitivity/free word order

Hallo!

On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 22:10:44 +0100,
Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:

> [/pf/ in German]
>
> But it still confuses me, from what little I know of
> the Germanic sound shifts. Didn't [pf] come from [pp]
> (appel --> Apfel)?
Yes, but there are other sources, see below.

>       Does that mean that OHG had initial
> long consonants :)?
No.  /pp/ > /pf/ is not the only source of /pf/ in German.
/p/ also changed into /pf/ in word-initial position and
after /m/.  Pre-OHG (in OHG the change already had happened)
didn't have initial long consonants.

> [...]
>
> Incidentally, what's with the extreme poverty of
> initial [x] in standard German? The only word I can
> think of is 'Chaos', which can either be [xa.os] or
> [ka.os], the latter pronunciation seeming to be the
> more common. Hochdeutsch has [x] all over the place in
> medial and final positions, but I've never seen it
> initially with any degree of regularity.
This is because initial /k/, unlike initial /p/ and initial /t/,
remained unchanged in standard German.  /k/ > /x/ after vowels,
nasals and liquids, but not initially.

Greetings,

Jörg.