German
In the southern varieties of German, the contrast between homorganic obstruents is rather an opposition of fortis and lenis than an opposition of voiceless and voiced sounds. Therefore, the term devoicing may be misleading, since voice is only an optional feature of German lenis obstruents. Likewise, the German term for the phenomenon, Auslautverhärtung, does not refer to a loss of voice and is better translated as 'final hardening'. However, the German phenomenon is similar to the final devoicing in other languages in that the opposition between two different kinds of obstruents disappears at the ends of words. The German varieties of the north, and many pronunciations of Standard German, do distinguish voiced and voiceless obstruents however.
Some examples from German include:
| Nouns | Verbs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Translation | Plural | Imperative | Translation | Infinitive |
| Bad | bath | Bäder | red! | talk! | reden |
| Maus | mouse | Mäuse | lies! | read! | lesen |
| Raub | robbery | Raube | reib! | rub! | reiben |
| Zug | train | Züge | sag! | say! | sagen |
| Fünf | five | Fünfen | |||
Read more about this topic: Final-obstruent Devoicing
Famous quotes containing the word german:
“A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)