Bammesberger, Alfred 1988 "Voice opposition in the system of Old English spirants", in: Dieter Kastovsky--Gero Bauer (eds.), 119-126.
Dekeyser, Xavier 1976 "Some considerations on voicing with special reference to spirants in English and Dutch.
Moulton, William 1954 "The stops and spirants of early Germanic", Language 30: 1-42.
(3) In Old English medial and final *[gamma] remained spirants and initial [gamma] is viewed as aspirant in the early West Saxon texts.
The nasal (phonetically [[eta]]) preceding the voiceless spirant in the original alternation which surfaced as Proto-Germanic *n[chi] ~ *n[gamma] was lost probably still in Proto-Germanic stage and is no longer evident in Old English.
The exact conditions of the variation can be defined as follows: When Germanie 3 came to stand finally in OE., it is probable that it became a voiceless spirant (x) just as in Goth.
Sounds in Spanish that are not included in the phonetic inventory of English are the voiced palatal nasal [[??]] as in [nino] (boy), the voiceless bilabial fricative [[phi]] as in [em[??]ermo] (sick), the voiceless velar fricative [x] as in [relox] (watch), the voiced
spirants [[beta]] as in [kla[??]o] (nail) and [[gamma]] as in [la[??]o] (lake), the alveolar trill [r] as in [pero] (dog), and the voiced uvular trill [R] as in [roto] (broken).
The letters <b>, <g>, <k>, (p), and <t> may represent either stops or
spirants; <b> may indicate /b/, /v/, or /w/; <g> indicates both /g/ and /B/; <k> indicates both /k/ and / [chi]/ (p) indicates both /p/ and /f/; and <t> indicates both /t/ and /u/.
(46) I have not yet made a comprehensive survey of this phenomenon, but it seems that this kind of metathesis will frequently occur, particularly when the second and third radicals are the pharyngeals and h, the velar
spirants gh, kh, etc.
Spirants are represented contradictorily: "Lamedh" but "Yod" (p.
Karlgren originally described his "Ancient" Chinese as "the language of Ch'ang-an around 600 A.D." But we now know that it was precisely in Ch'ang-an and just during the early T'ang that certain words of this particular shape underwent sweeping phonetic shifts, later followed by obligatory phonological restructuring, as the result of a dentilabialization that shifted some, but not all, labial stop initials to dentilabial
spirants, *p- [greater than] *f-.
Dietrich and Loretz argue, on the other hand, that the five letters for additional
spirants and fricatives were inserted into the traditional Phoenician/Canaanite sequence, a combination of two alphabet traditions realized in the middle of the second millennium B.C.
The examples are self-explanatory: the addition of an aspirated plosive results in the devoicing of a preceding spirant and the loss of aspiration on the plosive itself.
We will start our survey of the dental suffix variants and our attempt to capture several generalisations with the interdental spirant [o].
In other words, the spirant appears after vowels and after [r v y] only.
