Reduction

[Chuma]

I'm taking a course in Denmark at the moment. Being Swedish, I can sort of understand Danish, but it's a little tricky. I try to enunciate, so that we can understand each other, but the more clearly I pronounce things, the less it sounds like Danish.

It seems that English and Danish have something in common, in that they have a lot of reduction. But as I've understood it, reduction can be both productive and, shall we say, historical, and English has a lot of both.

So I have basically two questions. First, does Danish also have productive reduction, or is that all historical? It seems to me that Danish somehow sounds reduced even when it's slowly and deliberately pronounced, unlike English which changes a lot. But I don't really have any evidence of that.

Second, how common is reduction is general? I can't think of any good examples outside of Germanic and Romanic. How does it generally work? Are the same sounds considered relaxed in all languages?

[linguoboy]

Second, how common is reduction is general? I can't think of any good examples outside of Germanic and Romanic. How does it generally work? Are the same sounds considered relaxed in all languages?

By its very nature, isn't it likely to be confined chiefly to stress-timed languages?

Irish is chock-full of it. The actual rules vary by dialect; in Munster, stress is attracted to long vowels, but the initial syllable is not reduced (except in the case of the word amadán). Connacht and Ulster both have initial stress, but Connacht preserves the quality of non-initial long vowels whereas in Ulster they are shortened and reduced (as is also the case in Scottish Gaelic).

Not so in Welsh. It underwent a historical shift of the stress accent to the penult, but final syllables remained high pitched. So when a syllable is dropped in a word, it's likely to be the initial, when this is a stressed penult, e.g. gyda "with" > 'da, dyna "there is" > 'na, ysgrifennu > sgwennu. Welsh does have some vowel reduction, but very little: Final /ai/ and /aɨ/ generally simplify to /e/; in dialects of the Northwest, this is merged with /a/, e.g. enwau "names" > /ˈenwa/, rhedeg "running" > /ˈr̥edag/.

Widespread vowel reduction is characteristic of Russian and Belarusian, but is rare in Ukrainian and in other branches of Slavic. (Naturally, though, it's found in some varieties of Slovene.)

[Bob Johnson]

It's very common in an oxygen-free atmosph-- oh VOWEL reduction.

Do people commonly consider the vowel devoicing in Japanese to be reduction? /i/ and /u/ are devoiced or "disappear" in a low-pitch syllable not next to a voiced consonant.

[Ziz]

It's very common in an oxygen-free atmosph-- oh VOWEL reduction.

Do people commonly consider the vowel devoicing in Japanese to be reduction? /i/ and /u/ are devoiced or "disappear" in a low-pitch syllable not next to a voiced consonant.

I was gonna say something about that, but I suppose its mechanism is different from what people usually assume with "reduction."

[Thry]

Second, how common is reduction is general? I can't think of any good examples outside of Germanic and Romanic. How does it generally work? Are the same sounds considered relaxed in all languages?

Not necessarily the same sounds, remember that after all we're talking about sound changes and that happens variedly. Let me put a example from my romlang, though that counts as Romanic. Diphthongs monophthongize in different ways in each dialect (they also do so when they're stressed in certain dialects, so I also include it; these dialects are considered to be more "reduced speech"):

Unstressed:

haurais "I will have" /aw.'ɾɛʃ/, All dialects: [ɔ.'ɾɛʃ]
deurais "I will have to" /dew.'ɾɛʃ/ North, Standard: [de.'ɾɛʃ] South: [do.'ɾɛʃ]
mourais "I will move" /mow.'ɾɛʃ/ All dialects: [mu.'ɾɛʃ]

Stressed (North/Standard/South):

culpable "guilty" /kul.'paw.lə/ [kul.'pɔl] [kul.'paw.lə] [kul.'pɒ.lə]
possible "possible" /po.'sew.lə/ [po.'sel] [po.'sew.lə] [po.'sø.lə]
poble "town"/pow.lə/ [pul] ['pow.lə] ['pu.lə]

There's also normal monophthong reduction as in Catalan or Portuguese: /a/ alternates with /ɐ/, /ɛ e/ alternate with /ə/, /ɔ o/ alternate with /o/ and /i u/ stay the same. /ɐ/ merges with /ə/ in the North and can drop in the beginning of words: acteu sounds like [tʰe(w)], for instance. These are all dependent on stress, but stress is getting lost in the North dialect, so weird things are happening.