[dz] versus [dʒ]

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[dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Chengjiang »

At least in my experience, there are many, many languages that have [dʒ] without [ʒ], but very few that have [dz] without [z]. [dʒ] and [dz] both commonly derive from palatalization of voiced stops, fortition of [j], or assibilation of voiced palatal obstruents. The former is somewhat more common than the latter, but [dz] also seems more prone to deaffrication in the absence of [z] than [dʒ] is in the absence of [ʒ]. Any ideas as to why?
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Sumelic »

Well, it's not as extreme, but I think [ts] is likewise less common than [tʃ]. I've never really thought of [dz] as more prone to de-affrication than [dʒ]; what's the reason you say that? The main examples I can think of of [dz] > [z] are in French, where it was part of generalized de-affrication, and in various Slavic languages, where it seems to have been accompanied by [dʒ] > [ʒ]. Romanian also has [z] from earlier [dʲ], but it looks like it also had [dʲ] > [dʒ] > [ʒ] in similar contexts. If I'm reading the Wikipedia article right, the reason why modern Romanian has [dʒ] but not [dz] is because there was later palatalization of velars to [tʃ] and [dʒ].

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Tropylium »

For an Equus hemionus guess, I would suggest:
1) the most common source of /ʒ/ in languages is the lenition of earlier /dʒ/;
2) the most common source of /dz/ in languages is the fronting of earlier /dʒ/ (or /dʑ/);
3) the most common source of /z/ in languages is, however, the voicing of earlier /s/.

Hence, starting from a language that has no voiced sibilants, you first have decent odds of some kind of palatalization first creating /dʒ/; then roughly equal odds that this decays further into either /dz/ or /ʒ/; and a further small chance that these decay even further to /z/. However, at all points of this process, /z/ being created by voicing is also possible.

---

The underlying motivation to this might be that phonologically, [dʒ] is often analyzeable simply as a voiced palatal stop = [+voice] [+high] [-continuant], but [dz] probably needs to be encoded in "full detail": [anterior] [+voice] [+strident] [+delayed] [-continuant]. (Same also goes for [ts] versus [tʃ].)
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Chengjiang »

Tropylium wrote:For an Equus hemionus guess, I would suggest:
1) the most common source of /ʒ/ in languages is the lenition of earlier /dʒ/;
2) the most common source of /dz/ in languages is the fronting of earlier /dʒ/ (or /dʑ/);
3) the most common source of /z/ in languages is, however, the voicing of earlier /s/.

Hence, starting from a language that has no voiced sibilants, you first have decent odds of some kind of palatalization first creating /dʒ/; then roughly equal odds that this decays further into either /dz/ or /ʒ/; and a further small chance that these decay even further to /z/. However, at all points of this process, /z/ being created by voicing is also possible.
Well, yes, there is this which nicely explains the rarity of [ʒ] relative to [z], which is part of the issue.
The underlying motivation to this might be that phonologically, [dʒ] is often analyzeable simply as a voiced palatal stop = [+voice] [+high] [-continuant], but [dz] probably needs to be encoded in "full detail": [anterior] [+voice] [+strident] [+delayed] [-continuant]. (Same also goes for [ts] versus [tʃ].)
This is more or less what I was looking for, and I think you have the right idea here. [dz] has to be phonologically an affricate while [dʒ] doesn't have to be.
Last edited by Chengjiang on Tue Aug 30, 2016 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Chengjiang »

Come to think of it, IIRC a lot of languages have a segment that freely or idiolectally varies along a range like [ɟ]~[ɟʝ]~[ȡ]~[dʑ]~[dʒ]. (Either that or the "palatal stop representing postalveolar affricate" convention is frequently extended beyond transcriptions into actual detailed descriptions of the phonology by a lot of linguists.) So for a lot of languages with "/dʒ/" it has sounds like these as acceptable pronunciations, while /dz/ is generally only [dz]. (The main exception I can think of being /z/, or /d/ before /u/, in standard Japanese, which seems to freely vary between [dz] and [z].)
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Sumelic »

I think some languages may also have neutralization of [dz]~[dʒ]~[dʑ], usually accompanied by neutralization of [ts]~[tʃ]~[tɕ]. For example, apparently in Korean the lenis consonant ㅈ (which is voiced intervocalically, from what I understand) may be pronounced as an alveolar affricate in the Pyongyang dialect. Tagalog <dy> is said to vary between [dʒ], [dz] and [ʒ]; seemingly it depends mostly on dialect.

The Mandarin lenis consonant <z> is generally transcribed as [ts], since in most cases it has from what I understand approximately zero voice-onset time, but I remember reading somewhere that Mandarin lenis consonants can be voiced in some contexts.

In general, it seems to be harder for fricatives and affricates to be phonetically fully voiced than it is for plosives, but I don't know that that's relevant for phonology. It seems that plenty of languages get along fine with phonologically voiced/lenis fricatives and/or affricates that can be distinguished phonetically from their voiceless/fortis counterparts by other factors such as duration and aspiration. (E.g. I've read that German and Navajo /z/ for example are commonly devoiced; it may also be relevant that in both of these languages, the contrast with /s/ is often neutralized.)

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by mèþru »

I don't know about Navajo, Korean and Tagalog, but Chinese also has the same aspirated-unaspirated contrast in stops as in affricates. German has devoicing contexts for all voiced ostrubents. Very few languages have aspirated fricatives, while many have aspirated vs unaspirated (usually voiceless) stops. For fricatives, at least, I'd say they are more likely to be voiced than a stop. Affricates, on the other hand, tend to follow the patterns of stops.
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Chengjiang »

(In what follows, I'm using [ʒ] and [dʒ] loosely to mean postalveolar voiced sibilants in general, so e.g. [ʒ] also includes [ʑ] and [dʒ] also includes [dʑ].)

I've also noticed that [ʒ] will sometimes spontaneously affricate to merge into existing [dʒ] without any corresponding behavior from [z], and while sometimes this can probably be chalked up to influence from a neighboring language (e.g. Hindustani-influenced Pashto varieties) or to [ʒ] being an incompletely established segment of foreign origin (e.g. some English varieties), there seem to be other cases where it just sort of happens. I'm a little unclear and thus would like someone else to confirm this, but didn't Middle Chinese experience a merger of [ʑ] into [dʑ], followed by [ʐ] merging into [ɖʐ]? (The alveopalatal sibilants merged into the retroflex ones before this second part, but there was an original [ʐ] as well.)
mèþru wrote:For fricatives, at least, I'd say they are more likely to be voiced than a stop.
This is only partly true. In a system with VOT or fortis/lenis distinctions for both fricatives and stops, the distinction for fricatives is almost always one of tenuis versus (modally or otherwise) voiced, whereas stops show more diversity. However, stops are more likely than fricatives are to show a fortis/lenis or VOT distinction at all. There are many languages with two or more "rows" of stops and only one of fricatives (and in many of these the distinction in stops is or includes voicing), but relatively few with one row of stops and multiple rows of fricatives. Most commonly, languages I can think of that appear to do so have the "voiced fricative" row contain voiced obstruents with both continuant and stop allophones, e.g. Spanish or Proto-Germanic. There are a few languages like Yup'ik where it's defnitely voiceless stops, voiceless fricatives, and voiced fricatives, though.
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by linguoboy »

Sumelic wrote:(E.g. I've read that German and Navajo /z/ for example are commonly devoiced; it may also be relevant that in both of these languages, the contrast with /s/ is often neutralized.)
In Osage, /z/ is commonly unvoiced by still lenis. Could this be happening in these languages as well?

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Sumelic »

linguoboy wrote:
Sumelic wrote:(E.g. I've read that German and Navajo /z/ for example are commonly devoiced; it may also be relevant that in both of these languages, the contrast with /s/ is often neutralized.)
In Osage, /z/ is commonly unvoiced by still lenis. Could this be happening in these languages as well?
Yep. Sorry for the ambiguity; that was what I meant (/z/ is phonetically unvoiced, but still lenis). For Navajo, Wikipedia says:
Navajo also does not have consistent phonetic voicing in the "voiced" continuant members. Although /z, l, ʒ, ɣ/ are described as voiced in impressionist descriptions,[6] data from spectrograms shows that they may be partially devoiced during the constriction. In stem-initial position, /l/ tends to be fully voiced, /ʒ/ has a slight tendency to be voiceless near the offset, /z/ is often mostly voiceless with phonetic voicing only at the onset, /ɣ/ is also only partially voiced with voicing at onset. A more consistent acoustic correlate of the "voicing" is the duration of the consonant: "voiceless" consonants have longer durations than "voiced" consonants. Based on this, McDonough (2003) argues that the distinction is better captured with the notion of a fortis/lenis contrast. A further characteristic of voicing in Navajo is that it is marginally contrastive (see the voicing assimilation section).
For German, I think devoicing of /z/ mainly occurs word-initially, where the contrast between /s/ and /z/ is neutralized to /z/ (at least, for native words--I believe contrastive /s/ can occur at the start of loanwords like Sex, which Wiktionary says is rarely pronounced with the same initial consonant as sechs). Relevant link: Chilin Shih, Bernd Moebius, ‘Contextual Effects on Voicing Profiles of German and Mandarin Consonants
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by hwhatting »

I'm puzzled by your statement on German - yes, in standard German there is no contrast between /z/ and /s/ word-initially before vowels, but the phoneme showing up is /z/, with a voiced realisation, so how would that be devoicing? (Basically, the only place where the two phonemes are contrasted is between vowels; otherwise there is either /z/ in #_V- or /s/ everywhere else.)

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Sumelic »

hwhatting wrote:I'm puzzled by your statement on German - yes, in standard German there is no contrast between /z/ and /s/ word-initially before vowels, but the phoneme showing up is /z/, with a voiced realisation, so how would that be devoicing? (Basically, the only place where the two phonemes are contrasted is between vowels; otherwise there is either /z/ in #_V- or /s/ everywhere else.)
At the start of words, German /z/ is often not (fully) phonetically voiced. I think this tendency is stronger in some regional varieties/dialects, but as far as I can tell the paper that I linked to dealt with standard German, so it seems this also occurs in the standard language. Devoicing of word-initial voiced/lenis fricatives is also common in Dutch, although as with German, descriptions I have read say that the extent of this depends a lot on the regional variety that is spoken.

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by dwk »

That's certainly true for Austro-Bavarian speakers, especially Austrians who seem to have [z] only in certain environments e.g. insel, but I'm not sure if it's voiced after all voiced consonants.

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

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Sumelic wrote:Well, it's not as extreme, but I think [ts] is likewise less common than [tʃ]. I've never really thought of [dz] as more prone to de-affrication than [dʒ]; what's the reason you say that? The main examples I can think of of [dz] > [z] are in French, where it was part of generalized de-affrication, and in various Slavic languages, where it seems to have been accompanied by [dʒ] > [ʒ]. Romanian also has [z] from earlier [dʲ], but it looks like it also had [dʲ] > [dʒ] > [ʒ] in similar contexts. If I'm reading the Wikipedia article right, the reason why modern Romanian has [dʒ] but not [dz] is because there was later palatalization of velars to [tʃ] and [dʒ].
On the other hand, Polish used to have /dz/ but no (native) /dʒ / dʐ/.
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Sumelic »

Pole, the wrote:
Sumelic wrote:Well, it's not as extreme, but I think [ts] is likewise less common than [tʃ]. I've never really thought of [dz] as more prone to de-affrication than [dʒ]; what's the reason you say that? The main examples I can think of of [dz] > [z] are in French, where it was part of generalized de-affrication, and in various Slavic languages, where it seems to have been accompanied by [dʒ] > [ʒ]. Romanian also has [z] from earlier [dʲ], but it looks like it also had [dʲ] > [dʒ] > [ʒ] in similar contexts. If I'm reading the Wikipedia article right, the reason why modern Romanian has [dʒ] but not [dz] is because there was later palatalization of velars to [tʃ] and [dʒ].
On the other hand, Polish used to have /dz/ but no (native) /dʒ / dʐ/.
Oh, where does Polish /dz/ come from?

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by hwhatting »

Sumelic wrote:Oh, where does Polish /dz/ come from?
Proto-Slavic /d/ + /j/. It's exactly parallel to Proto-Slavic /t/ + /j/, which gave /t_s/.

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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

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Pole, the wrote:
Sumelic wrote:Well, it's not as extreme, but I think [ts] is likewise less common than [tʃ]. I've never really thought of [dz] as more prone to de-affrication than [dʒ]; what's the reason you say that? The main examples I can think of of [dz] > [z] are in French, where it was part of generalized de-affrication, and in various Slavic languages, where it seems to have been accompanied by [dʒ] > [ʒ]. Romanian also has [z] from earlier [dʲ], but it looks like it also had [dʲ] > [dʒ] > [ʒ] in similar contexts. If I'm reading the Wikipedia article right, the reason why modern Romanian has [dʒ] but not [dz] is because there was later palatalization of velars to [tʃ] and [dʒ].
On the other hand, Polish used to have /dz/ but no (native) /dʒ / dʐ/.
When you say "used to have", do you mean [ɖʐ] has been innovated in native vocabulary since then? I thought modern Polish words in [ɖʐ] were still only from loans and occasional voicing assimilation of [ʈʂ].
hwhatting wrote:
Sumelic wrote:Oh, where does Polish /dz/ come from?
Proto-Slavic /d/ + /j/. It's exactly parallel to Proto-Slavic /t/ + /j/, which gave /t_s/.
Doesn't Polish (and Lechitic in general) also have [dz] from the second regressive and the progressive palatalizations of velars? Making it an affricate that sprang up after very early Slavic first-palatalization [dʒ] had already deaffricated?
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Pole, the »

When you say "used to have", do you mean [ɖʐ] has been innovated in native vocabulary since then? I thought modern Polish words in [ɖʐ] were still only from loans and occasional voicing assimilation of [ʈʂ].
I mean it used to have none, and currently has no native ones. Bare one specific cluster: /ʐdʐ/ (which appears in native words).

However, there are native words with /d-ʐ/ (two separate consonants), which, depending on the idiolect, can be realized as anything between [d̪-ʐ] and [dʐ-ʐ]. Also, it seems like before a consonant the opposition is neutralized before a consonant (so, there are native words like [dʐvi] or [dʐdʐovɲitsa] commonly pronounced with initial affricate [dʐ]).
Doesn't Polish (and Lechitic in general) also have [dz] from the second regressive and the progressive palatalizations of velars? Making it an affricate that sprang up after very early Slavic first-palatalization [dʒ] had already deaffricated?
Yes. Also, from some random changes, like bardzobarzo.
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Re: [dz] versus [dʒ]

Post by Chengjiang »

Possibly relevant to this topic: Apparently in Hausa, morphophonological processes that palatalize alveolars convert [t d s z] to [tʃ dʒ ʃ dʒ].
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