intervocalic voicing of fricatives

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:29 PM -0500 6/25/02, Donald M Lance wrote:
>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.
>
Right, but it should be noted that there are MANY speakers who have
always said "Jo[z]e" but have never said "Jeru[z]alem", so I think
the stress difference is relevant here for a lot of us (e.g. me).

larry