intervocalic DEvoicing can also happen / X > Y > X

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I welcome Alan King's message.  On his first point:
 
>B. Wald says: It just happened -- because both directions
>>are possible (under certain conditions -- certainly NOT ****z > s /V_V).
>That provoked me to try and think of counterexamples to Benji's latter
>assertion here.
 
Good.  If I'm wrong, I'd like to know as soon as possible, so that I don't
keep on thinking that and misleading other people.  That's my best pay-off
for my interventions on the list.
 
He continues:
 
>I couldn't come up with an example of z > s /V_V, but I
>did find one of +voice > -voice /V_V.
 
Just as good.  I would have thought that if such a change occurs it can't
be due to the intervocalic position (just as in the z > s "reversal" case),
and would expect it to occur in that position only as part of a more
general voicing shift (which the intervocalic position is not able to
resist at the time).
 
A short digression.  He asked:
>(Okay, I'm going to be a pain and say it: just what is "Central Spanish"
>supposed to mean?  The phenomenon in question includes the WHOLE of
>Castilian (i.e. Spanish) in its territorial extension.
 
I don't know.  In my insecurity as a non-expert, and without checking, I
wanted to rule out some non-Central (northern) dialects, without being sure
which ones, maybe Leonese or Aragonese or whatever, where maybe z > s did
not occur, at least at first (since I remembered it is said to have been
observed first in the "Central" dialects like Castille -- and not to have
taken effect until, say, after the Jews were expelled, so that Ladino still
has-z- in "casa" etc.)
 
To get back to the main point, Alan proposes an example from some
(southern) Welsh dialects.  I'm not sure I understood the entire
discussion, but the situation seems to be as follows:
 
>I have put quotes around "voiced" and "voiceless" because
>phonetically all stops in Welsh tend to be voiceless (or at least voicing
>is not critical) and the contrast is realized principally in terms of
>tenseness and aspiration.  To simplify the exposition I shall henceforth
>largely ignore that fact in the transcriptions and terminology used.)
 
Alan is referring to STANDARD Welsh here, and that by "critical" he must
mean relevantly that the degree of voicing of the "tense" stops varies.
The issue then becomes whether this is a novel situation or reflects an
older situation in which there were consistently voiced stops that have now
come to vary in voicing as they shift to tenseness as their primary (or
distinctive) feature.  The issue is also whether this shift, if it is so,
is ONLY intervocalic (post-stress) or whether it is general to the stop
paradigm (e.g., pre-stress, initial, etc.).  He continues:
 
>... in Northern spoken Welsh, this system has
>been altered, in that nearly all consonants in the intervocalic post-stress
>position are pronounced geminate (and correspondingly, all stressed vowels
>followed by a consonant in non-final syllables are short - but I'm going to
>focus on the consonants here).  So corresponding to standard ['ka:dajr] we
>will find ['kaddar] in northern Welsh, while ['etto] shows no change since
>the consonant is already geminate.
 
Very interesting.  I would assume that the gemination of voiced stops
represents an interruption of voicing between vowels, and that even the
shortening of a long vowel before a geminate voiced stop anticipates such
an interruption.  In any case, that does seem to me a mechanism by which
intervocalic voiced stops could devoice -- and to the extent that
gemination is strictly an intervocalic phenomenon in Welsh the stage is
indeed set for devoicing of the intervocalic stop.
 
Finally, he notes:
 
>Now: apart from this gemination and shortening, but possibly related to it,
>we find some varieties of Welsh in which, corresponding to consonants like
>the /d/ in <cadair>, if the consonants in question are "voiced" stops in
>standard Welsh, we find "voiceless" stops instead: ['katar] etc.  Assuming
>once again that the standard form is diachronically prior, we then have d >
>t (or possibly d > dd > t) in post-stress intervocalic position, and
>similarly b > p and g > k.  Irritatingly, this phenomenon has been noted in
>the south, in an area not contiguous to the northern "geminating" varieties.
 
In which case, it is commendable that Alan suggests that the route assumed
may have been a continuation of the one still evident in the north.  I need
to reflect further on this case, but it seems plausible to me on the face
of it.  What gives me most pause is whether this "counts" as STRICTLY
intervocalic position, if there is the assumed geminate intermediate stage,
and it just so happens that geminates only occur intervocalically -- so
that it might be interpreted as a shift of voicing in GEMINATES, regardless
of their position -- which just happens to be intervocalic.  I'm also not
sure I followed the entire thing.  For example, since there were also
geminate VOICELESS intervocalic stops in these dialects of Welsh, was there
a merger, or did the "voiced" geminates de-geminate before "fully"
devoicing?  i.e.,
 
-tt- vs. d > dd > *td* > t (where somehow *td* is something that avoided
merger with -tt- as it
                                       devoiced.)
 
The phenomenon is certainly interesting in its own right, and deserves
further attention, possibly further dialectal research to examine what can
be discovered about the details of the path.  This is particularly
important if the result is -tt- vs. -t- (< -tt- vs. -d-), since Alan's
suggestion seemed to be that gemination had something to do with the
devoicing.  So far the evidence in the south does not indicate that, but
only that, for some reason, -d- came to move into a space parallel to -tt-
by devoicing.  If that's the case, it is indeed a counter-example to the
notion that stops cannot devoice intervocalically without first going
through some other changes (like gemination and associated metric effects
on syllabification).
 
I appreciate Alan's example, and hope that further clarity will emerge on
the historical changes represented in it.
 
PS.  I forgot whether Alan mentioned this, but if a form like "chair" had a
long vowel before the stop originally, as in the standard, and shortened it
before gemination in the north, then the shortening in the south may also
suggest prior gemination.  Obviously we need to know a whole lot more about
the history of the relevant Welsh dialects before we can draw secure
conclusions.