To understand the nature of German affricates, their historical development needs to be considered. The following section provides a short description about the historical sound shift of the Indo-European languages to Standard High German (cf.
Figure 1).
The first Germanic sound shift, implying the sound change from borrowings of the Indo-Germanic languages to Proto-Germanic, was described by Jakob Grimm in 1822 (Grimm’s law). Grimm’s law illustrates a sound shift of all obstruents (except for /s/). The voiceless stops /p, t, k/ changed to voiceless fricatives /f, S, x/, a process also known as spirantization (e.g. Latin pater became father in English).
Further, the voiced stops /b, d, g/ became voiceless /p, t, k/, and finally voiced aspirated stops /bh, dh, gh/ lost their aspiration and changed into plain voiced stops /b, d, g/ (cf. Table III).
Table III: First Germanic sound shift - Grimm’s law
Indo-European consonants Proto-Germanic
Stops p t k f S x
b d g p t k
bh dh gh b d g
In 1875, Karl Verner submitted further rules that explained some of the exceptions to Grimm’s Law. He described the historical development of consonants in the Proto-Germanic language based on stress rules. Hence, his rules mainly stated a stress shift, through which /f, S, x/ when immediately following an unstressed syllable (in the same word), underwent voicing and became respectively /v, ?, I/.
The sound /s/ either remained unchanged or it became /z/ and later /r/. Thus, Verner’s law explained why /d/ appears when the preceding syllable was originally unaccented, and /þ/ occurs when the preceding syllable was originally accented:
• Greek: patér, Sanskrit: pitár → fadar‘father’
• Greek: phrater, → Gothic broþar ‘brother’.
A third stage of changes implies a stress shift to the initial syllable, which is also called West-Germanic gemination. A simplified illustration of the development of the Germanic languages, based on Lahiri and Kraehenmann (2004), can be found in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Simplified family tree of the Germanic languages. The sound changes are marked in italic letters.
The Low German dialects, such as Dutch, Flemish and Frisian, as well as English, kept the Germanic sounds, whereas the Standard High German consonantal system developed by another change. This change is resumed as the “Old High German consonant shift” or “second consonant shift”. In historical phonology, the Old High German consonant shift is referred to as the process of development of voiceless
Indo-European
Grimm’s Law
Verner’s Law
OHG Consonant Shift
Gemination Proto-Germanic I
Proto-Germanic II
West-Germanic
Pre-OHG
Old English Old Low German
Dutch English
Standard German OHG
Considering the status of affricates in word-initial position, the singleton voiceless stop consonants [p, t, k] became affricates [pf, ts, kx], suggesting that word-initial affricates are monosegmental.
Table IV: Second Germanic consonant shift
Stops West-Germanic Pre-OHG Word-initially p t k pf ts kx
Word-medially -p -t -k -ff -ss -xx -pp -tt -kk -pf -ts -kx
In word-medial-position, the decision about the status of affricates is more difficult.
The singletons [-p, -t, -k] changed to fricatives [-ff, -ss, -xx]. The historical positive evidence suggests that the geminates [-pp, -tt, -kk] became affricates [-.pf, -.ts, -.kx].1 The historical negative evidence supposes that there was no OSL (open syllable lengthening) and affricates developed as heterosyllabic clusters [-p.f, -t.s, -k.x]. It is strange that in Standard High German no OSL is found before word-medial affricates [-pf, -ts] suggesting that the preceding syllable containing the vowel is blocked. If word-medial affricates were monosegmental, this blocking would not be possible. In some situations, the second consonant shift has not led to an initial closed syllable, as in the case of sonorants. The preceding vowel is sometimes long, although the original vowel was short and in an open syllable, as the following example illustrates.
OHG OE German English
Zala talu zahlen [a:] pay
A more detailed description of OSL in West Germanic is given in Lahiri and Dresher (1999).
1 The velar affricate [kx] changed to either a stop or a fricative (Lahiri & Kraehenmann, 2004) in Standard High German, but it still exists in the South German dialects, as well as in Alemannic.
Related to that, the length of the preceding vowel determines whether a voiced or unvoiced consonant follows. Long vowels are usually followed by voiced consonants, whereas short vowels are followed by unvoiced consonants.
Consequently, one would not find a long vowel followed by one of the affricates [-pf, -ts] (since German has only unvoiced affricates). Rather rarely, a long vowel is followed by [-p, -t, -k] because their origin is found among the geminates [-pp, -tt, -kk] (e.g. Haken [ha:kn] ‘hook’, Pre-OHG: *häggOn, OE: hOc, OHG: hAcko). It is remarkable that after this final sound shift, no voicing contrast remained for stops in OHG. Instead, a new contrast of manner came up, which is the contrast between stops and affricates (Lahiri & Kraehenmann, 2004). If one of the stops /p, t, k/ was preceded by /s/, the latter remained unchanged. This explains why so many exceptions were found to Trubetzkoy’s (1967) rule (3) (cf. 2.3).
From the historical development, it is clear that the consonant shift had major consequences on the syllable structure. If word-medial [-f, -t] became geminates [-ff, -tt], then clearly the resulting initial syllable would be short and no OSL applies.
WGmc English German
wæpnam weapon [e] Waffe
*water water [a:] Wasser
The old word-medial geminates became affricates:
WGmc English German oppron offering Opfer
*Waitin heat Hitze
The question remains, what happened to affricates? If they were monosegmental, OSL would have applied. If they were bisegmental, OSL would have been blocked by the second consonant shift, as in the case of fricatives. Since we do not find any long vowels before the German affricates, there is evidence to suggest that affricates
Among others, Vennemann (1985) assumed that the development of the Germanic consonant shift might have proceeded differently. He doubts the simple change from geminate stops to affricates, arguing that for example, labial affricates occur rather rarely (only in German, Beembe and Teke, cf. section 2.1.3). He mentions that in 317 different languages, he found not a single one containing labial, alveolar (or dental) and velar (or postalveolar) affricates. For instance, Standard High German contains labial and alveolar affricates only. Vennemann (1985, pp. 544-545) questions “[…] assuming that the HGmc. affricates developed from aspirates in a Grimmian second sound shift, why haven’t they in any of the remaining Gmc.
Languages […]. And I mean affrication of the entire series, not just of the alveolar which is known to be liable to affrication in a way that labials and velars are not”.
The exact way in which affricates developed does not really affect the purpose of this investigation. What is important for the present investigation is that there is a contrast between stops and affricates (and fricatives) and that they developed at some stage from either geminates or singletons. The resulting claim is that word-initial affricates have a monosegmental status whereas word-medial affricates are bisegmental. I will provide evidence for this claim by the results of the acoustic examination (cf. chapter 4).
Assumptions made in the following chapters regarding the historical sound change will refer to a development of German affricates, as it is presented in Table III and IV.