Re: A question on palatalization.

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.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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