English
English no longer has a productive process of voicing stem-final fricatives when forming noun-verb pairs or plural nouns.
- belief - believe
- life - live
- proof - prove
- strife - strive
- thief - thieve
- ba - bae
- brea - breae
- mou (n.) - mou (vb.)
- shea - sheae
- wrea - wreae
- houe (n.) - houe (vb.)
- ue (n.) - ue (vb.)
Synchronically, the assimilation at morpheme boundaries is still productive, such as in:
- cat + s > cats
- dog + s > do
- miss + ed > mi
- whizz + ed > whi
The voicing alternation found in plural formation is losing ground in the modern language,, and of the alternations listed below many speakers retain only the pattern, which is supported by the orthography. This voicing is a relic of Old English, the unvoiced consonants between voiced vowels were 'colored' with voicing. As the language became more analytic and less inflectional, final vowels/syllables stopped being pronounced. For example, modern knives is a one syllable word instead of a two syllable word, with the vowel 'e' not being pronounced. However, the voicing alternation between and still occurs.
- knife - knives
- leaf - leaves
- wife - wives
- wolf - wolves
The following mutations are optional:
- ba - bas
- mou - mous
- oa - oas
- pa - pas
- you - yous
- houe - houes
Sonorants (/l r w j/) following aspirated fortis plosives (that is, /p t k/ in the onsets of stressed syllables unless preceded by /s/) are devoiced such as in please, crack, twin, and pewter.
Read more about this topic: Consonant Voicing And Devoicing
Famous quotes containing the word english:
“I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew—and I knew it was important to know—that Papa worked hard all day long.”
—Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)