Re: German sibilants and consonant clusters.

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:45:17 +0200, Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:

>Several years ago, as I was beginning my study of
>German, I noticed that no native word (at least in
>Hochdeutsch) had a cluster of any kind that had [s] +
>consonant; it was always [S].
>
>I'm curious as to why this is so. I was told by my
>linguistics professor that Old High German had two
>variants of /s/ — an apical and a laminal, most
>likely, he said.
To the best of my knowledge, the OHG sibilants were <z> = laminal, and <s> =
apical. To my ear apical alveolar /s/ has a darker sound than laminal
alveolar /s/, so I can see an apical sibilant more readily being reanalyzed
as [S] than a laminal sibilant, particularly if both start out in the
denti-alveolar region.

>Is this so, and if it is indeed so, how did this
>original opposition between apical and laminal
>sibilants evolve from the original PIE consonant inventory?
Doing a quick google, it looks like medial OHG -z- was equivalent to Gothic
-t-, so the laminal sibilant probably developed via affrication of the
coronal series, long after Germanic had separated from PIE.

Bfowol