intervocalic voicing of fricatives

[Donald M Lance]

on 6/25/02 12:49 PM, James A. Landau at JJJRLandau at AOL.COM wrote:

> In a message dated 6/25/02 8:43:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> charles at FREUDE.COM writes:
>
>> My observation is that in the USA the [second] s in "San Jose" is
> essentially always
>> voiced, and the s in "El Paso" and names containing "mesa" is never voiced.
>> This is probably not related to the placement of the stress, as your
>> examples indicate.
>
> I have a suggestion specific to "Jose/".  In English there are very few
> common words that have /os/ (that's supposed to be a long "o" as in "home").
> The only ones that come to mind are "gross", "close" (adjective only, the
> verb is /kloz/), and "dosido".  "Explosive" (and the phonetician's variant
> "plosive") can have either /s/ or /z/.  On the other hand, for /oz/ there is
> "bows", "blows", "cozy", "closing", "crows", and so on alphabetically.  Do
> you find it surpri/z/ing that "Jose" gets a /z/?
>
Verner's Law 'mesa' and 'jose' have different stress patterns.  Press W's
phonology doesn't follow the penultimate sentence.

But Verner's Law doesn't explain the Jeruzalem items in the original query.
Some lexicalization involved too.

DMLance