Re: German style orthography

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

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