LINGUIST List 13.450

Mon Feb 18 2002

Sum: Voicing-Conditioned Vowel Alternations

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  • Elliott Moreton, Voicing-conditioned vowel alternations

    Message 1: Voicing-conditioned vowel alternations

     Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 17:41:01 -0500 (EST)
    From: Elliott Moreton <moretonvonneumann.cog.jhu.edu>
    Subject: Voicing-conditioned vowel alternations


    Dear Linguists:

    Thanks to everyone who replied to my query about vowel quality alternations conditioned by the voicing specification of adjacent consonants: Dave Odden, Paul Johnston, Thorsten Schroter, Michael Johnstone, Paul Boersma, Mary Paster, Remy Viredaz, Dieter Wunderlich, Geoffrey S. Nathan, Wolfgang M. Schultze, Price Caldwell, Tobias Scheer, and Viktor Tron. To the examples I already had from English (Canadian Raising/Southern Monophthongization) and Polish (morphophonemic u/o alternation), they added some from Nilotic, Madurese, Scots, Shetlandic Scots, Buchan Scots, Yakut, Maastricht Limburgian, and Czech. They also made short work of my putative diachronic German example. A summary is appended.

    I'm interested in this because of an article by Erik Thomas in the Journal of Phonetics in 2000, in which he raises the possibility that there is hyperarticulation before voiceless obstruents. I think this is right. Voiceless obstruents are themselves hyperarticulated (review: Maddieson & Ladefoged _Patterns of Sounds_ 1996:95-99). In English, mid and low vowels become lower before voiceless (Summers 1987 JASA, Wolf 1979 JPhon, Fujimura & Miller 1979 Phonetica), with more lowering closer to the consonant. Meanwhile, the high offglide of Eng. /ai/ becomes higher (Thomas 2000 JPhon), as do the offglides of /au oi ei/ (Moreton 2001 LSA and in prep, ask if you'd like a draft).

    Since the hyperarticulation of [-voice] obstruents is widespread, I'd expected phonologized alternations on the pattern of Canadian Raising/Southern Monophthongization, and Polish, to turn up in more places. The present harvest is encouraging, but most of the well-documented examples are from near relatives of English and Polish. The Madurese alternation goes the "wrong" way; however, there the consonant precedes rather than follows the vowel (and does not affect its length), so it is probably a separate phenomenon. Thanks again,

    Best wishes, Elliott Moreton

    ____________________________________________________________ NILOTIC

    David Odden writes:

    Not unrelated is something that Keith Denning did in his Stanford dissertation, regarding the relation between breathy vs. modal voice and vowel quality in Nilotic. Essentially, what he pointed out is that perceived vowel height is related to vocal tract geometry, that the "back tube" can be lengthened either by raising the tongue or lowering the larynx, and that breathy vowels often also involve larynx lowering; hence they also seem to be a bit higher.

    The interesting thing about these cases, in comparison to the ones you mentioned, is that they don't involve vowel length (i.e. voice and vowel length are related, and length is related to height). <end David Odden quote>

    This dissertation is a treasure trove of examples. Denning proposes a universal:

    "In lgs in which ther eis a regular correlation between perceived vowel height and phonation (i.e. pitch, phonation type or voicing in consonants), greater height is associated with relative laryngeal laxness and/or voicing." (p. 59)

    ____________________________________________________________ POLISH and CZECH (with an excursus on GERMAN)

    Raising in Polish -- a morphophonemic alternation in which some /o/s surface as [u] before an underlying voiced coda consonant (Gussmann 1980 _Studies in Abstract Phonology_; Kenstowicz 1994 _Phon. in Gen. Gr._ 74-78):

    nom. sg. m[u]d 'fashion' gen. pl. m[o]da

    Tobias Scheer <Tobias.Scheerunice.fr> writes:

    this alternation is indeed very common in Polish, but it is heavily restricted by morphological and lexical parameters (the latter related to frequency of the word). There is no synchronic activity for sure since present-day [u] > alternates only with [o] if it comes from a former [o]. [u]s that have always been [u] do never alternate. Polish spelling notes this difference: alternating [u] is written "o with an acute accent", identifying its diachronic source, while regular [u] is spelt "u".

    The same alternation concerns the two nasal vowels of Polish (written E for the front, O for the back one hereafter):

    dOb "oak NOMsg" - dEb-u "oak GENsg

    etc. both the O-E and the o-u alternation are instances of the same original process, which, alas for you, does not modify vowel quality, but vowel quantity:

    o > oo / __C+voice #

    and there are two conditions, not just one: the input-o must occur before a voiced consonant which on top of being voiced needs to be word-final. Exactly the same alternation o-u is found in Czech, with the same conditioning. Furthermore, Czech has the advantage of not having eliminated vowel-length as Polish did, to the effect that the original contrast in length is still visible (the forms hereafter are not spelling, N=palatal nasal):

    kuuN "horse NOMsg" - koNe "id. GENsg" - koN-sky "id., adjective"

    etc. much more data and illustration is available in a handout of a class of mine which you can download at

    http://www.unice.fr/dsl/tobias.htm

    then go to "classes taught at Warsaw", and click on the course-handout. Polish-Czech o-u is in section 12.13 on p.44ss and a parallel German alternation in strong verbs is discussed on p.45: beissen "bite" where <ss> is [s] derives a preterite biss where the [i] is short whereas preisen "worship" where <s> is [z] derives a preterite pries where the <ie> is long.

    <End quote from Tobias Scheer>

    The course handout mentioned above is very detailed and informative, and could provide a whole semester's worth of problem sets.

    ____________________________________________________________ ENGLISH: Canadian Raising/Southern Monophthongization

    Canadian Raising / Southern Monophthongization (English) - a very widespread alternation in which /ai/, and sometimes also /au/, is higher before voiceless codas than voiced ones (Chambers 1973 CanJLing 18:113-135):

    CR SM

    tight t^It taIt tide taId ta:d

    Paul Boersma <paul.boersmahum.uva.nl> and Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnsiu.edu> suggest that the alternation is not conditioned directly by the voicing of the following consonant, but by the difference in vowel length (which in turn depends on voicing).

    ____________________________________________________________ SCOTS: Scottish Vowel Length Rule

    Michael Johnstone <mjj1000hermes.cam.ac.uk> and Viktor Tron <troncoliuni-sb.de> pointed out that the famous SVLR induces quality alternations in /ai/. The SVLR applies to Modern Scots reflexes of certain Middle Scots vowels:

    Middle Scots (16th cent.) /ei i: e: u: * ui ou iu E a o/ Modern Scots /% e u u ! i ^u ju E a o/

    (/%/ see below; /*/ = slashed o, Cardinal 10, upper mid front rounded; // = schwa; /!/ = several diphthongs; see Aitken 1981 pp 132-133). These vowels are long

    before a morpheme boundary, or before a voiced fricative and a morpheme boundary, or before [r] and a morpheme boundary

    and short elsewhere (Aitken 1981 p. 135). The present-day reflex of MS /ei/ undergoes a quality change like that of Canadian Raising/Southern Monophthongization: _price_ [pris], _prize_ = [pra:ez]. A slew of references are provided by Viktor Tron:

    A. J. Aitken (1981) The Scottish Vowel Length Rule In. M. Benskin and M.L. Samuels (eds) So Meny People, Longuages and Tonges, pp 131-157. Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project.

    Scott Allan (1985) A note on AYE distribution. Journal of Linguistics 21. pp 191--194

    J. Derrick McClure (1977) Vowel duration in a Scottish accent. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 7. pp 10-16

    April M. S. McMahon (1991) Lexical Phonology and Sound Change: the case of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule. Journal of Linguistics 27. pp 29-53

    James Myers (1999) Lexical Phonology and the Lexicon. Rutgers Optimality Archive #330-0699

    J. M. Scobbie, N. Hewlett and A. E. Turk (1999) Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: the Scottish vowel length rule revealed. University of Edinburgh ms.

    ____________________________________________________________ BUCHAN SCOTS: Height harmony blocked by [+voice] obstruents

    Mary Paster <pastersocrates.Berkeley.EDU> writes:

    According to Eugen Dieth's (1932) grammar of the dialect, the facts are these: High, unaccented vowels in the second syllable undergo lowering to a mid variant if the preceding vowel is non-high (i.e. mid or low -- so it's not total height assimilation). The pattern holds for root-suffix (with some suffixes being excepted for some reason), word-clitic, and, apparently, within words. But the lowering harmony is blocked by voiced obstruents (and a few select sequences of other consonants). This gives rise to the (relatively) famously-cited pair [lase] 'lassie' vs. [ladi] 'laddie', where the lowering is blocked on the diminutive suffix in 'laddie' (I gather that Scots makes more use of the diminutive suffix than we do, so Dieth's grammar has a ton of examples of it, and it's clearly a robust pattern -- at least, it was in 1932). <End Mary Paster quote>

    Paster also mentions an article by Colleen Fitzgerald in a recent or near-future _English Language and Linguistics_ (and has one of her own in prep).

    ____________________________________________________________ SHETLANDIC SCOTS: Raising before voiced sounds

    Paul Johnston <johnstonpwmich.edu> writes:

    Voicing conditions vowel alternations in Shetlandic, and to some extent, Orcadian Scots, though the "voiced" group may be more broken up.

    Scots /a/ = Shetlandic [a] before vl. sounds, [ae] before vd. ones As in bat/bad Scots /E/ = Shetlandic [E] before vl. sounds, [e] or [ei] before vd. ones As in bet/bed Scots /a:/ = Shetlandic [a:] before vl. sounds, [ae:] (North/West) or [D:] (South--that's a low back rounded vowel) before vd. ones as in salt (saut)/Maud

    Some of the other vowels show this alternation too, but only before obstruents; voiced sonorants behave like voiceless obstruents, or introduce a third allophone.

    The exact equivalent of the first and third rules also operate in some types of Northumbrian English, particularly of the Coalfield and East Central Part of the county of Northumberland.

    bat = [bat] bad = [baed] salt = [sa:t] Maud = [maed]

    The best [reference] for Orcadian/Shetlandic is probably mine: Johnston, Paul. 1997. "Regional Variation" in Jones, Charles (ed.) . The Edinburgh History of the Scottish Language, pp. 433-513. Relevant material is on 464, 485, 489. Also 464 (for /E:/). My data came from: Mather, James Y. and Hans-Henning Speitel. 1986. The Linguistic Atlas of Scotlkand, Vol. 3: Phonology. London: Croom Helm. and observations.

    The Nhb. stuff was personally observed. I mentioned it in my Ph. D. thesis, but that's unpublished. However, I think Henry Warkentine's (1964) hard-to-find thesis on Hexham, Nhb. dialect (I haven't got a full ref.) may have it. If you want to plow, you can get the whole distribution by looking at relevant words in Orton, Harold and Wilfrid H. Halliday. 1962. The Survey of English Dialects, Vol. I. Basic Material: The Six Northern Counties and the Isle of Man. Leeds: Arnold.

    Look at Community Nb 4 particularly. <End Paul Johnston quote.>

    ____________________________________________________________ MADURESE: Raising after voiced or voiced-aspirated C

    David Odden <oddenling.ohio-state.edu> called my attention to this one, which is described in detail in

    Stevens, Alan M. (1968). Madurese Phonology and Morphology. American Oriental Series, #52. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

    Stevens describes a class of "higher determinant" consonants, which he writes as

    Lab Den Alv Pal Vel voiced stops /b d d, z g / aspirates /bh dh d,h zh gh/

    plus /w/ and most instances of /j/ (exceptions for morpheme juncture). The four principal vowel phonemes /a i u / occur in two versions, raised and lowered. Following a higher-determinant consonant, vowels are raised. This effect propagates through the word until stopped by a lower-determinant consonant (anything that is neither higher-determinant, /s/ or /j/ with a close juncture, [r], or [q]). Vowels not raised are lowered.

    There is a relevant paper by Cohn and Lockwood (1994, not seen) in the Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Lab. ____________________________________________________________ YAKUT: Lengthening and breaking-to-diphthong before [+voice]

    Remy Viredaz <remy.viredazbluewin.ch> pointed me to

    Grammont, Maurice (1933). Traite de phonetique. Paris: Librairie Delagrave.

    A paragraph on p. 187 reads:

    We find in some languages a phenomenon which is in a certain sense the opposite of the Latin phenomenon [devoicing of a stop with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel, te:ctum < tegere]. In Osmanli, a short vowel + voicless consonant remains short vowel + voiceless consonant:

    Yakut Osmanli /at/ 'horse' /at/ /ot/ 'plant' /ot/ /as-/ 'open' /atS-/

    But a long vowel + voiceless consonant becomes a short vowel + voiced consonant:

    Yakut Osmanli /a:t/ 'name' /ad/ /uot/ 'fire' /od/ /a:s/ 'starved' /adZ/ /bu:t/ 'hip' /bud/ 'thigh' /y:t/ 'milk' /yd/ /ky:s/ 'force' /gydZ/

    <end Grammont>

    G. doesn't discuss the breaking-to-diphthong, but it seems that Yakut underwent a change /o/->/o:/->/uo/ before originally voiced consonants. Many more examples, though no published source, can be found in an assignment from Bert Vaux's class at Harvard:

    http://icg.harvard.edu/~sa34/assignments/asgt7.pdf

    ____________________________________________________________ MAASTRICHT LIMBURGIAN: Lengthening and breaking-to-diphthong before [+voice]

    Paul Boersma <paul.boersmahum.uva.nl> contributes a parallel breaking case:

    [W]e can consider a similar case in Maastricht Limburgian, in which high vowels became (or become, in an abstract analysis) diphthongs if a final schwa dropped after a voiced consonant. Thus: bli:2ve -> blEi1f 'stay-1SG' bli:2ven -> bli:2ve(n) 'stay-INF' So we have vowel alternations within verb paradigms, if the consonant is voiced. In nouns, we have similar examples: du:2ve -> dOu1f 'pigeon' du:2ven -> du:2ve(n) 'pigeons' The free ride in this case is provided by the change from second to first tone, which occurs precisely when schwa is dropped after an originally voiced consonant (or currently voiced; the sonorants do it as well, as in Polish). So the real conditioning factor is probably the presence of the first tone, though it is hard to distinguish this from conditioning by voicing, since there are no underlying or original first tones on the vowels /i:/, /u:/, or /a:/ (which becomes [O:] under tone change or voiced schwa drop). The Maastricht case is further complicated by the fact that unlike in Polish, there are original consonant-final forms, which don't change: bli:2f -> bli:2f 'stay-IMP.SG' So underlyingly, there may be a voiced consonant here as well, but historically there isn't. This is some extra evidence for the causation of vowel change by tone. Now one would like to know the details of what happened in Polish... [the Maastricht change also occurred if there was *no* consonant, as in ri:2e -> rEi1 'row' and ly:2(d)e -> loei1 'people'] <end Paul Boersma quote>

    ____________________________________________________________ GERMAN: Not really

    My original query asked about:

    (3) A "well-known sound change" in German in which long vowels are shortened and lowered before voiceless consonants (mentioned briefly in Kohler 1984 Phonetica 41:150-174):

    M[U]tter 'mother' Br[u:]der 'brother'

    Several people wrote in to deny that this was anything of the sort: Thorsten Schroter <thorsten.schroterkau.se>, Paul Boersma <paul.boersmahum.uva.nl>, Remy Viredaz <remy.viridazbluewin.ch>, Dieter Wunderlich <wdlphil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de>, Wolfgang M. Schultze <W.Schultzelrz.uni-muenchen.de>, and Tobias Scheer <Tobias.Scheerunice.fr>.

    That this is not synchronic is shown by Wunderlich's examples:

    b[U]ddeln 'dig' g[u:]ter 'good' strong masc.sg.nominative

    Wolfgang Schultze connects it with the open/closed syllable distinction:

    Though there seems to be a tendency to shorten long vowels before vl. consonants [such as _V[a:]ter_ 'father' shifting towards _V[A]ter_ esp. Rhenanian and some northern varieties], the standard formula is that there is a correlation between

    length/hight and V-final syllable ('open') short/lowered and C-final syllable ('closed')

    Hence we have

    M[U]t-ter 'mother' g[u:]-ter 'a good one' etc.

    b[I]b-bern 'to tremble' B[i:]bern 'for the beavers' etc.

    And remember that the opposition M[U]tter / Br[u:]der is conditioned by etymology (< *mat:r resp. *bhr:ter). <End Wolfgang Schultze quote>

    Tobias Scheer adds more examples of short vowels before voiced stops: wabbern, blubbern, daddeln.

    Paul Boersma and Tobias Scheer point out that the only certain correlation is between vowel height on the one hand and vowel length (of whatever origin) on the other: [U] and [u:], never [U:] or [u].

    Remy Viredaz comments:

    The German example does not conform exactly to the formula you have used. In many cases, a long vowel has remained long before a voiceless consonant (Buch 'book', Hut 'hat', Mut 'courage', Haut 'skin', Euter 'udder'), and even a short vowel has sometimes become long in that environment (Vater 'father'). I haven't looked through the 19th and 20th century grammars to see if our "forefathers" have been able to see some order in all this. However, the voiced vs. voiceless character of the vowel has certainly played a role in many cases. MHG short i, u seem to have been lengthened before a voiced obstruent (Glied 'member') or a sonant (viel 'much') and not before a voiceless consonant (Schnitt 'a cut') or a consonant cluster. <End Remy Viredaz quote>

    Finally, Price Caldwell <pricemail.hinocatv.ne.jp> mentions the tendency of high vowels to disappear entirely (or at least become devoiced) between voiceless consonants.

    Many thanks again to all contributors.

    Sincerely, Elliott Moreton