Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 1
Voiceless Stop Contrasts in Alemannic German
Introduction
Voiceless stop contrasts that are not based on place of articulation can be among the hardest sounds to identify, especially phrase initially. Alemannic High German lost its voicing contrast in Pre-Old High German (OHG) during the second consonant shift, yet (obviously), the spoken language today is fully functional and contrastive.
This paper will explore how the voiceless stops in Alemannic German established and retained contrasts, and whether the process involved is one of fortis-lenis, or one of consonant duration.
Background
The Modern Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian, an Alemannic German language, has phonological stops in only three places of articulation, labial, coronal, and velar; and the language makes six distinct sounds from them. Since the language does not possess a voicing contrast for stops, the contrast has to come from a process of either strengthening (fortitian), or lengthening (gemination). Researchers Aditi
Lahiri and Astrid Kraehenmann (2004) looked to Old Alemannic, spoken about a thousand years earlier, to see if how the sound system evolved could offer an explanation. They studied a manuscript written by a Benedictine monk in the tenth century, in which the writer, Notker der Deutsche, had managed to capture the Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 2 allophonic alternation of the time in his orthography. They described his rule of alternation as Notker’s Anlautgesetz, or “law of initial consonants”: he alternated the letters he used for phrase-medial consonants at the beginnings of words, depending on whether the preceding word ended in a voiced or a voiceless sound. Specifically, he used the Latin letters ‘b’ and ‘g’ if the preceding word ending was voiced, and the letters ‘p’ and ‘k’ if the preceding word ending was voiceless. Since it has been historically postulated that Alemannic German had already lost its voicing contrast by Notker’s time, Lahiri and Kraehenmann argue that he was actually attempting to capture, using the writing system available to him at the time, a contrast of consonant quantity or duration.
Nature of the Contrasts in Old Alemannic
Notker’s Anlautgesetz was supposed to account for all stops in word-initial position; they were simply in complementary distribution based on the sonority of the word- final sound immediately preceding them. Based on this alone, it would seem that Old
Alemannic lacked contrasts of any kind and that the change was merely one of allophonic alternation. However, when Lahiri and Kraehenmann charted all the stops in word initial and word final position (as written), they found that while
and , and
Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 3
Nature of the Contrasts in Modern Alemannic- Thurgovian
In comparing the vocabulary with initial stops in Notker’s German with their
Modern Alemannic equivalents, Lahiri and Kraehenmann found that most of the words survived into Thurgovian, and where the older language had an allophonic distinction between initial stops, the modern equivalents all began with a single voiceless stop. Where it had phonemic distinctions between
Thurgovian words contrasted between a single [t] and a geminate [tt], respectively.
However, the vocabulary of words in modern Thurgovian contain word-initial phonemic distinctions not just between the coronal stops [t] and [tt], but also the labials and dorsals [p], [pp], and [k], [kk], respectively. The question then, is where
Thurgovian acquired its system of consonant duration stops for the other places of articulation. A closer look at the vocabulary quickly reveals that “words with initial geminates are essentially all borrowed, from the middle ages onwards: /ppaːʀ/ French/Latin ‘pair’, /ppatə / n i h ‘pa e’, / pp/ French ‘c p ice-crea ’, / a tʃ/ n i h ‘c ch’.” Since speakers are limited by their system of phonology when introducing borrowed words into their lexicon, they have to use the resources available to them to maintain contrasts and avoid neutralization. From Old Alemannic they already had a singleton/geminate distinction for coronal stops, and when loan words were introduced with both voiced and voiceless word initial stops, they simply extended their current system of contrast to include labials and dorsals and effectively integrate new contrastive sounds into their language while maintaining their phonological inventory. Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 4 So, What is the Nature of the Contrasts Themselves? Researchers looking at Alemannic German have debated over what the contrast between voiceless stops actually is. Some (Penzl, 1971; Weinberg, 1911) have argued that the distinction is one of fortis-lenis, where what could be perceived as a duration distinction among consonants is in fact a phenomenon of stops being articulated more strongly to create a contrast. Others, like Lahiri and Kraehenmann, argue that the contrast is one of consonant quantity, where stops that were originally voiced before the Pre-OHG consonant shift surface as voiceless singleton stops, and stops that were originally voiceless surface as voiceless geminate stops, with a longer closure duration. They maintain that the voicing contrast was already lost in Notker’s time and that he merely used the orthography of voiced stops to show a distinction in the Latin writing system available to him. Fortis-Lenis Distinction According to Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996), fortis consonants have greater respiratory energy and/or greater articulatory energy. Since all the voiceless stops in Alemannic represent a ‘fortis’ distinction by these terms, the distinction would be found in the degree of fortitian between contrasting consonants, and lenis would be unspecified. DiCanio (2012) explained fortis in somewhat simpler terms, that it is “primarily realized by changes in consonant duration, while for obstruents, preaspiration is a significant correlate of the fortis series.” He goes on to say that “No acoustic correlate of increased articulatory strength… is shown to be a significant correlate of the contrast.” Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 5 He argues instead that fortis is best specified phonologically by duration and a spread glottis. However, fortis-lenis distinctions are often used not just to distinguish how strongly a sound is articulated (or for how long), but also to account for secondary characteristics such as spirantization. Since such a phenomenon is not a contrastive distinction in Alemannic German, and the glottis is always spread for the stop consonants, the fortis account for the contrast does not seem to be a necessary and sufficient description for the stop distinctions observed in Thurgovian. Quantity-Duration Distinction Lahiri and Kraehenmann have established since the beginning of their research that the contrast in Thurgovian is one of consonant duration, or as they say “quantity”, since it references the distinction between singleton and geminate stops. They give the following examples to show the distinctions: (Lahiri and Kraehenmann, 2004) Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 6 Originally, they had established that acoustically, [W]ord-initial geminate CDs were about twice the length of singletons when in an intersonorant context. However, when a preceding word ended in an obstruent consonant, the contrast was neutralized by geminates having become shorter and singletons longer. The quote was from their more recent, 2008 paper referencing their 2004 ‘Anlautgesetz’ work. In this, more current research, they add articulatory electropalatography (EPG) measures to compare with their previous closure duration (CD) acoustic data they had previously collected, in order to see if their findings were correct and if geminates did in fact neutralize after voiceless obstruents. What they found is that the contrast was indeed maintained, however minimally, in a phrase-medial context following another obstruent by an average difference of about 16 ms. They could not claim for sure if the contrast was detected by the listener, but speakers always articulated it in some way. Their EPG diagrams are included on the next page to show how long the stops are articulated in each context. They analyzed singleton and geminate stops in four specific contexts: namely: in isolation, consonantal, vocalic, and word medial context. They found that the difference between [ttoː ə] (roar) and [t ː ə] (can) word initially was about 150 ms., the difference between the two in a consonantal context- [nɔx tt ː ə] (after roar) vs. [nɔx t ː ə] (after can) was zero; however, when they re-did their CD data, they found a difference of 16 ms., as mentioned above. In a vocalic context, EPG readings showed a i erence 60 . between [ ni tt ː ə] (without roar) an [ ni t ː ə] (without can), and in a intervocalic word medial context, the difference between [lattə] (crossbar) and [latə] Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 7 (shop) was huge, at 160 ms. Their conclusion is that the singleton/geminate contrast was maintained in all positions in Thurgovian for stop consonants, even (at least articulatoraly) where it was previously considered neutralized in a consonantal context. Furthermore, since the distinction does not rely on aspiration or specific amounts of articulatory force, the contrast of duration seems to be necessary and sufficient. (Kraehenmann and Lahiri, 2008) Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 8 Conclusion Researchers looking at Alemannic German have tried to explain in the simplest way how the contrast between voiceless stops is maintained. As early as Heusler (1888), many have contended that the distinction is based on a level of strength, either in aspiration or articulation. However, as I hope the above data makes clear, a singleton/geminate duration contrast is far simpler when discussing voiceless contrasts. Duration is certainly an aspect of fortis that could be used to define the distinctions, but the lack of specificity as to what degree of strength is needed to make the contrast, as well as the fact that lenis stops are largely unspecified (often only that they lack strength) makes a fortis-lenis distinction insufficient to describe the voiceless contrast phenomenon in Alemannic. Consonant duration or quantity has been shown in both acoustic and articulatory measures as the primary distinction between voiceless stop contrasts, and is the simplest explanation for the contrast as it surfaces in Thurgovian Swiss dialect. *Note: I would like to further research the articles cited by Kraehenmann and Lahiri about the fortis- lenis contrast as written by German researchers in the 1800’s onwards that also were based off of Notker’s manuscript, but I was unable to access the full text for them for this paper. Voiceless Stop Contrasts Annika Ronay . Ling 201 . 5/15/14 9 Works Cited Dicanio, Christian T. "The Phonetics of Fortis and Lenis Consonants in Itunyoso Trique." International Journal of American Linguistics 78.2 (2012): 239-72. JSTOR. Web. 1 May 2014. Hudson, Grover. "Consonant Release and the Syllable." Linguistics 33.4 (1995): 655- 72. JSTOR. Web. 1 May 2014. Kraehenmann, Astrid, and Aditi Lahiri. "Duration Differences in the Articulation and Acoustics of Swiss German Word-initial Geminate and Singleton Stops." Acoustical Society of America 123.6 (2008): 4446-455. JSTOR. Web. 5 May 2014. Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell, 1996. Print. Lahiri, Aditi, and Astrid Kraehenmann. "On Maintaining and Extending Contrasts: Notker's Anlautgesetz." Transactions of the Philological Society 102.1 (2004): 1-55. JSTOR. Web. 1 May 2014.