Talk:Final-obstruent devoicing

message: "There are however some exceptions in very few words borrowed from English."
I can't say whether or not these exceptions occur in Afrikaans or Russian, etc. But there are certainly no such exceptions in German. It should be clarified what languages know exceptions in foreign words. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.52.167.158 (talk) 09:22, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I second that and remove the sentence. If someone wants to reinsert it, please add some details, such as language, circumstances, examples etc. --Neg 19:53, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In German, it varies a lot depending on the speaker. Younger Germans, especially those who know English well, do make an effort to suppress final devoicing when using English words like Job and Airbag in German. —Angr 21:34, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of them might try, but the norm is certainly to pronounce job (a very common word in German news reporting when unemployment is being discussed) like chop. --Doric Loon (talk) 14:35, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Those who know will do so when actually speaking English. When speaking German, at least the words that are by now full German words, will also be pronounced in a German way. "Job" (spoken: Tschopp) certainly belongs to them.--151.100.102.140 (talk) 17:03, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where does this sentence belong? 

message: Wouldn't that rather be medial voicing of fricatives? --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:54, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Diachronically at least, it's both. The complementary distribution of [f] and [v] in Old English results from (1) the devoicing of Proto-Germanic *β to [f] when it was word-final in Old English, and (2) the voicing of Proto-Germanic *f to [v] when it was intervocalic in Old English. Also, note that Proto-Germanic *x (*h) did not undergo intervocalic voicing in Old English (instead, it disappeared), but Proto-Germanic *γ did undergo final devoicing to [x] (spelled h) in Old English. +Angr 10:10, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old English 

message: I wonder if the "List of languages with final obstruent devoicing" should be split into parts. The list has a high proportion of Germanic and Slavic languages, and it might be more useful to have, say, four lists: Germanic; Slavic; other IE; non-IE. This won't split the list into even quarters, but I think it will make it easier to make sense of. (And it might encourage the addition of interesting examples.) —RuakhTALK 17:02, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you, CodeCat! :-)   —RuakhTALK 23:56, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split list into parts. 

message: When listening to South Africans speaking English I often hear final devoicing, which along with other differences helps to make it sound characteristically Dutch-accented (or Afrikaans-accented) to me. Is it true that South African English has final devoicing? CodeCat (talk) 15:03, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Some speakers might have final devoicing, but by no means all of them. Peter238 (talk) 17:01, 26 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Afrikaans-accented SAE sounds quite different from SAE that has little or no Afrikaans influence. The kind with Afrikaans influence not only usually has final devoicing, it also usually has unaspirated stops in words like pan, tan, can. But speakers without much Afrikaans influence don't have final devoicing (at least, no more so than speakers of other varieties of English) and do have aspirated stops. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 07:19, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  South African English 

message: In a discussion on Wiktionary I noticed that even when some languages have devoicing of the same types of sounds, there might still be a difference in when that devoicing is applied. In Dutch, for example, devoicing is not purely phonetic, but has a lexical/morphological element. Words that are devoiced in isolation are also devoiced when they are part of a compound: badwater "bath water" has a voiceless [t], like bad does by itself, even though the plural baden has a voiced [d]. Similarly for avondzon "evening sun" with [ts], but avonden with [d]. On the other hand, I believe that many Slavic languages don't have this phenomenon; they devoice only in isolation, but apply voicing assimilation in clusters as a form of sandhi (I know Slovene does this, at least). Is this something that should be noted in the article? CodeCat (talk) 19:20, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, definitely.  Otherwise readers familiar with one language may assume that others are like it.  Since you have the examples, could you do the honors?  — kwami (talk) 06:40, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  I only really have the example I gave, and no sources... CodeCat (talk) 17:51, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Good enough.  If it's challenged we can see about proving it.  — kwami (talk) 20:06, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Different types of final devoicing 

message: The list at the end of the article mentions Marshallese, but also notes that this language has no voicing contrast to begin with. This feels a bit like cheating to me; allophonic variation doesn't seem like "true" final devoicing. So I'm wondering whether the usual definition of FOD concerns phonetic devoicing (the actual loss of voiced articulation) or phonemic (the loss in contrast between voiced and voiceless). In the latter case, it might be interesting to consider the wider phenomenon of obstruent collapse, not just loss of distinction in voicing. I believe that many languages have deaspiration of final consonants as well, for example. CodeCat (talk) 20:30, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, it's a form of neutralisation that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with voice in the phonetic sense (compare my criticism above), so the term is misleading. As for final consonants, it's not only deaspiration but can be "de-release-ation" as in no audible release as well. If, for example, English final voicing is indicated by lengthening of the preceding vowel or also absence of preglottalisation/pre-aspiration, "devoicing" is really a type of shortening of the preceding vowel or preglottalisation etc. phonetically. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:20, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

text: Remember how PIE seems to have final voicing? Whatever may have happened there phonetically ... --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:25, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonetic or phonological? 

message: Removed this line:
:Relics of a final devoicing of "v" are to be found between words so related as "half" and "halves", and "knife" and "knives" distinguishing singular and plural.
This is not due to a process of a voiced phoneme losing voicing word-finally (which is what this article is about), but rather a voiceless phoneme /f/ that had the voiced allophone [v] intervocalically in Old English.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.181.243.30 (talk) 11:44, 30 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Which is correct for Old English, but came about by, yes, the devoicing of Proto-Germanic *b: *halbaz (contrast e.g. German halb, Swedish halv), *knībaz (contrast e.g. Swedish kniv). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 23:50, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Then it belongs in a section on Proto-Germanic, not English.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.181.243.30 (talk) 09:48, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: English

message: The list "other languages" includes Armenian (for stops). This is not appropriate, since devoicing occurs in an unpredictible way: Some words written with a letter usually denoting a voiced stop (and I skip the discussion about the exact phonetic nature of these stops) are pronounced with a voiceless aspirated stop (including affricates!), but there are many words with a "voiced" word-final stop/affricate, such as [bad] "duck", [meg] "fog", [t'ag] - apostrophe for aspiration - "crown", as against <mug> [muk'] "dark" or <bardz> [barts'] "cushion" and many more on both sides. Remarkably, the word for "crown" with its "voiced" final stop changes this stop to a voiceless aspirate in the word <tagavor> [t'ak'avor] "king" = "bearer of a crown". This unpredictability is clearly shown in the "Armenian orthographic-orthoepic-terminological dictionary" by Barselyan (1973) - in Armenian -, where all deviations from the expected pronunciation are indicated in square brackets.
I suggest to remove Armenian from the list, since there is no regularity with final devoicing.
Michael Job [mjob@gwdg.de] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8108:85C0:8399:8D94:5D03:7CE2:21BC (talk) 22:47, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Armenian 

message: thief-thieves, bath-bathe do not illustrate compounding. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:25, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Devoicing in compounds - inappropriate examples