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Re: German style orthography

From:J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
Date:Saturday, December 11, 2004, 2:42
On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 19:50:37 +0000, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

>It seems really strange to me that s is always voiced at the start of >words... how did this arise? I could understand it if (since I'm >assuming that originally german had no contrast between [s] and [z]) s >was always [z] intervocally, but.. I don't know, I'd just really like to >know how it became voiced at the start of all native german words.
It's not like this in all varieties of standard German. Southern standard German has no voiced fricatives (except for /v/, which might as well be considered an approximant /v\/) and not voiced stops at all. The southern German opposition between /s/ and /z/ (e.g. in words such as _reissen_ /'raIs@n/ "to rip" vs. _reisen_ /'raIz@n/ "to travel") is often described as an opposition of fortis vs. lenis, though I've always had the impression that it'd be an opposition of long consonant vs. short consonant. I imagine that High German (that is, southern German) formerly had an opposition of short and long consonants, such as is still reflected in the orthography and preserved in certain varieties, e.g. many Swiss dialects. I also imagine there might have been an interrelation of only having voiceless fricatives/stops and of distinguishing short and long consonants. I don't know it for sure. I also imagine, again without any source, that the voiced stops/fricatives were always present in Low German. Maybe their occurrence in the actual "standard" pronunciation is due to a Low German substratum? For sure, the actual prescriptive standard pronunciation is the pronunciation of the educated upper class of northern German cities. gry@s: j. 'mach' wust

Replies

John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)