Phonetic Perspectives on West Germanic Consonant Gemination

Abstract

The distribution of geminates resulting from North and West Germanic consonant gemination suggests that velar obstruents were the segments most favored by the change, whilerwas least favored and blocked the operation altogether. In an attempt to account for this behavior, the phonetic characteristics of these sounds are examined in the context of the geminating environments. It is demonstrated that these preferences can be accounted for through coarticulatory and acoustic effects of the trigger on the preceding consonant and vice versa. Although many previous analyses have glossed over the details of consonant gemination in West Germanic, it is argued here that in order to understand sound change, coarticulation, perception, and allophonic variation must be taken into account.

On the cross-linguistic avoidance of rhotic plus high front vocoid sequences

“…What is more, Hall argues that there is an articulatory explanation for the avoidance of /rj/. Denton (1998) similarly observes that /rj/ can be avoided but her explanation is very different from the articulatory one advanced by Hall (2003Hall ( , 2004, which we further refine below. See also Walsh Dickey (1997) and Hall (2000), who offer very different explanations for the avoidance of palatalized rhotics like /r j / cross-linguistically.…”

“…In an early WG word like [fo:.djan] the Cj sequence is syllableinitial (see the references cited above, in which arguments are presented for this parsing) and hence the Syllable Contact Law is satisfied. 16 The explanation for the non-gemination of /r/ is different from the one proposed by Murray and Vennemann (1983), Ham (1998) and Denton (1998).…”

“…See Denton (1998) In the WG data above we see that the consonant that geminates can be a stop (in 14a), a fricative (in 14b), a nasal (in 14c) or the lateral /l/ (in 14d). The gemination facts in (14) can be contrasted with the data in (15) below, which show that /r/ does not geminate before /j/ in WG, and that it surfaces as the singleton [r] instead:…”

“…Although there is consensus that /r/ was the only consonant that blocked WG Gemination, there remains disagreement concerning the reason for this blockage (see, for example, Murray and Vennemann, 1983;Ham, 1998;Denton, 1998;Hall, 2004). For purposes of this study we can think of Proto-WG as consisting of two stages called here 'Early WG' and 'Late WG', which are defined in terms of WG Gemination.…”

Gothicsiuns, the Domain of Verner's Law and the Relative Chronology of Grimm's, Verner's and Kluge's Laws in Germanic

“…In various articles published over the last two decades or so, Frederik Kortlandt (1978Kortlandt ( , 1988Kortlandt ( , 1991reaffirmed 1996, 2000, building on his theory that the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) mediae were preglottalized voiced stops (Kortlandt 1978(Kortlandt and more especially 1981(Kortlandt , 1985 1 has claimed, contrary to the traditional view (e.g. Voyles 1992, 1 For detailed refutation of most of the arguments for this contained in Kortlandt's 1981 and1985 papers, including demonstrations that the preglottalization is secondary in Slavic and Sindhi, see Woodhouse 1996.…”