LL-L: "Phonology" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 22.JUN.1999 (04)

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From: "john feather" <johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Voicing and unvoicing

Ron

I have been having trouble with Outlook Express and have lost a lot of
messages so please excuse the lack of back-references.

The discussion of the use of voiced and unvoiced dental suffixes to form the
past tense of weak verbs (or more accurately, I suppose, the weak past tense
of verbs) and the raising of  " 't kofschip" reminded me of something which
I have observed but never seen in print. The observation is that "I have to"
is commonly pronounced "I haff to", thus with unvoicing of the [v]. I cannot
think of another example. In Russian and no doubt many other languages this
unvoicing is perfectly normal: the words are written one way and pronounced
another.

My questions are:
1. Are there other examples in standard English?
2. Are there examples in other Lowland Languages? It occurs to me that where
people are creating orthographies they may be more aware of phenomena like
this.

(In Swedish the combination "rs" is pronounced "rsh", even when the letters
are in different words, but that rule is universal.)

John
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at geocities.com>
Subject: Phonology

John,

In reference to your inquiry above, let me just say that I have noticed that
final devoicing (including syllable-final devoicing) applies in one way or
another in all of the languages we deal with here, with the exception of
English.  (From what I can see, Scots has a devoicing tendency too.)

This is a problem regarding standard orthography, mostly because the creators of
the phonologies did not have clear understandings of underlying representations.

In Dutch, it affects final /-z/, for instance, but not final stops.  Thus, you
write _huis_ 'house' but _huizen_ 'houses'(?).  The underlying phoneme is /z/.
Thus, it should be written _huiz_, and the speaker devoices the _...z_ to
[...s], and this would be analogous with e.g. _hoed_ [hut] (not *_hoet_) ->
_hoeden_ ['hud@].  I suppose the same applies to /-v/ being written as _-f_.  I
have suggested this before, and the reaction I got from Dutch speakers was one
of dismissal, and upon further examination this was merely "because we are used
to it this way."

Here is were it gets absurd.  In Low Saxon (Low German) of Germany, which has no
standard spelling, the motto has been "write as closely to Standard German as
possible if a word has a High German cognate."  The official line is that this
is supposed to make it easier for the _Plattsprecher_ (who are apparently deemed
capable of learning other languages but are obviously considered too stupid to
deal with a non-German system for their own language).  The very important
by-product, however, is that, at least until the recent official recognition of
Low Saxon as a language, this deliberately created German look of the written
language was supportive of the myth that Low Saxon is a German dialect group.
The use of German-style "lengthening h" is a good example, considering that
traditionally Low Saxon has been representing vowel length exactly as in Dutch
and Afrikaans.  (So you get homophonous pairs, e.g., _Paal_~_Pool_  'pod' vs
_Pahl_~_Pohl_ 'pole'.)  (_Paal_ has no German cognate, but _Pahl_ has the
cognate _Pfahl_.)  This applies to final devoicing as well.  For instance,
underlying /v/ is always represented as _f_ in final position.  Here is a good
example: the word for 'court(yard)' is written as _Hoff_ [hOf], cf. German _Hof_
[ho:f], and the plural is either _Hööv(')_ [hø:.v] or _Höven_ [hø:vm], depending
on the dialect, cf. German _Höfe_.  Obviously, the singular ought to be written
as _Hov_, since /v/ is underlying and undergoes devoicing by phonological rule.
The only time final _-v_ is written is in the case of "superlength" or "dragging
tone," as in_Hööv(')_ [hø:.v] above, a feature specific to Low Saxon where final
-e got lost and the preceding vowel receives extra length (i.e., _Höve_ ['hø:ve]
> _Hööv(')_ [hø:.v]).  But wait!  There's more!  Here too you must assimilate to
German.  For example, 'dead' is _tot_ [to:t] in German and _dead people_ are
_Tote_ ['to:t@], thus final /t/ is underlying.  In Low Saxon you are supposed to
write _doot_ 'dead' but _Dode_ 'dead people'.  _Dood_ would be correct for
'dead'.  Likewise, you are supposed to write _Tiet_ (cf. German _Zeit_) 'time'
but revealing underlying /d/ in _Tieden_ (cf. German _Zeiten_) 'times'.

Regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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