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Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives * β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ. [1] The law was formulated by Karl Verner, and first published in 1877.
Rhotacism (/ ˈ r oʊ t ə s ɪ z əm / ROH-tə-siz-əm) [1] or rhotacization is a sound change that converts one consonant (usually a voiced alveolar consonant: /z/, /d/, /l/, or /n/) to a rhotic consonant in a certain environment.
Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). [1]
Nevertheless, voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, bad cat [bæd̥ kʰæt]). Additionally, the voiced alveolar stop /d/ is regularly devoiced in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). [9]
Burmese exhibits consonant mutation, involving voicing in many compound words. The primary type of consonant mutation is that if two syllables are joined to form a compound word, the initial consonant of the second syllable becomes voiced. The shift occurs in these phones: /kʰ, k/ → /ɡ/ /tɕʰ, tɕ/ → /dʑ/ /sʰ, s/ → /z/ /tʰ, t/ → ...
When a consonant ends a word, or when more than a single consonant follows a vowel within a word, the syllable is closed and therefore heavy. (A consonant is not the same thing as a letter. The letters x [ks] and z [dz] each count as two consonants, but th [θ] , ch [k] , and ph [f] count as one, as the pronunciations in brackets indicate.)
The voiced alveolar sibilant is common across European languages, but is relatively uncommon cross-linguistically compared to the voiceless variant. Only about 28% of the world's languages contain a voiced dental or alveolar sibilant.
The initial consonant in the word finger in traditional dialects of England. Initial fricative voicing is a process that occurs in some traditional accents of the English West Country, where the fricatives /f/, /θ/, /s/ and /ʃ/ are voiced to [v], [ð], [z] and [ʒ] when they occur at the beginning of a word.