Voicing assimilation In many languages, including
Polish and
Russian, there is
anticipatory assimilation of unvoiced
obstruents immediately before voiced obstruents. For example, Russian 'request' is pronounced (instead of ) and Polish 'request' is pronounced (instead of ). The process can cross word boundaries as well: Russian 'daughter would'. The opposite type of anticipatory assimilation happens to voiced obstruents before unvoiced ones: . In
Italian, before a voiced consonant is pronounced within any phonological word: 'mistake', 'sled', 'slender'. The rule applies across morpheme boundaries ( 'cancel') and word boundaries ( 'black pencil'). This voicing is productive and so it applies also to borrowings, not only to native lexicon: .
Final devoicing Final devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as
German,
Dutch,
Polish,
Russian and
Catalan. Such languages have voiced
obstruents in the
syllable coda or at the end of a
word become voiceless.
Initial voicing Initial voicing is a process of historical sound change in which voiceless consonants become voiced at the beginning of a word. For example, modern German , Yiddish , and Dutch (all "say") all begin with , which derives from in an earlier stage of Germanic, as is still attested in English
say, Swedish , and Icelandic . Some English dialects were affected as well, but it is rare in Modern English. One example is
fox (with the original consonant) compared to
vixen (with a voiced consonant). == Notes ==