Re: A question on palatalization.

At 9:57 AM -0600 1/2/03, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:
>
>> > *Which makes me wonder why. Why didn't biscop become */bIZ@p/, even
>> > allophonically? I understand long fricatives in Old English weren't
>> > voiced, could this have been long then?
>>
>> I don't think that allophonic voicing of spirants affected /S/; why not,
>> I have no idea.
>
>[S] is a [-anterior] segment according to most systems of feature
>geometry.  If the soundchange affects only [+continuant] [+anterior]
>segments (thus creating [v D z] out of [f T s]), we would expect
>exactly such a dichotomy.
If intervocalic voicing in Old English is due to Verner's Law, then it had
probably become lexicalized by the time that the cluster <sc> became [S]. In
which case, [S] would be immune from the voicing rule.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

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