# Consonant Mutation in Other Languages



## Meyer Wolfsheim

Hello everyone,
                     In English (or at least my register), sometimes the consonants/vowels in a word change from their normal pronounciation due to where they are positioned in a sentence.  

For example: I have a bike.  Here the second consonant in 'have' is a 'v' sound.  

But:  I have to go.  Here the second consonant in 'have' is now an 'f' like sound.  

I notice this change occurs because of the 'to', but are there any other such cases of this English and does this happen in other languages like Spanish, French, German, etc.? (also, are these occasional consonant changes listed/shown in the dictionaries?)


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## Flaminius

> [A]re there any other such cases of this English (...)?


How about /s/ being realised as [ʃ] after [j]?  Eg, this year as [ðɪʃ jɪə]

You ask if other languages have consonant values changed according to the phonetic environment?  

Hebrew:
Phoneme /z/ is sometimes realised as [s] in casual speech when followed by a voiceless stop.  Eg. מה זות אומרת? (_ma zot omeret_?; "What does it mean?" > "What are you saying?") is often "masto meret?".

Phomene /h/ (in fact [ɦ]) is often lost inside a word.  The sequence את ה- (no direct English translation; את is the direct object marker before a definite noun and ה- is the definite article).  Thus פתח את הדלת! (_ptach et ha delet_; "Open the door!") is often "Ptach ta delet."

Both of them are considered very casual.  They are not reflected in the written language; thus no mention in dictionary entries.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Flaminius said:


> How about /s/ being realised as [ʃ] after [j]? Eg, this year as [ðɪʃ jɪə]
> 
> You ask if other languages have consonant values changed according to the phonetic environment?
> 
> Hebrew:
> Phoneme /z/ is sometimes realised as [s] in casual speech when followed by a voiceless stop. Eg. מה זות אומרת? (_ma zot omeret_?; "What does it mean?" > "What are you saying?") is often "masto meret?".
> 
> Phomene /h/ (in fact [ɦ]) is often lost inside a word. The sequence את ה- (no direct English translation; את is the direct object marker before a definite noun and ה- is the definite article). Thus פתח את הדלת! (_ptach et ha delet_; "Open the door!") is often "Ptach ta delet."
> 
> Both of them are considered very casual. They are not reflected in the written language; thus no mention in dictionary entries.


 
Interesting that you gave hebrew examples, but in ''this year'', the 's' remains the same as 's' and does not change.


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## origumi

[hæv] vs. [hæf]: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1366942


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## phosphore

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> In English (or at least my register), sometimes the consonants/vowels in a word change from their normal pronounciation due to where they are positioned in a sentence.


 
That phenomenon is called sandhi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Origumi's  reply answers my question perfectly.


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## Flaminius

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> Interesting that you gave hebrew examples, but in ''this year'', the 's' remains the same as 's' and does not change.


Yes, it does in a lot of English varieties.  I am not a native speaker but I have heard "this year" uttered by enough many people.

The same "sh" sound can be heard in "I miss you" as well.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Flaminius said:


> Yes, it does in a lot of English varieties. I am not a native speaker but I have heard "this year" uttered by enough many people.
> 
> The same "sh" sound can be heard in "I miss you" as well.


 

I have never heard either of those here in the U.S.  I also never make the 'sh' sound for those combinations.  Where is this phenomenon?


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## Flaminius

Well, Meyer, I cannot say where because this phenomenon is all over the English-speaking countries.  Here is a testimony of someone who lives in USA:


> (...) heard people say "lastchear" ('last year' with a distinct 'tch') and "thishyear" ('this year' with a distinct "sh").


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## berndf

Flaminius said:


> Well, Meyer, I cannot say where because this phenomenon is all over the English-speaking countries. Here is a testimony of someone who lives in USA:


Here is another one. I think the point is that it is not [ðɪʃ jɪə] as you initially wrote but ['ðɪʃjɪə] where [ʃj]slides from [ʃ] via [ʒ] (voicing starts) to [j] (movement from post-alveolar to palatal).

Concerning your example of _et hadelet_ becoming _tadelet_, I suspect elision is a formation by analogy: The prefix -ל is a shortening of the the stand alone preposition אל (_el=to_) and one doesn't say nor write אל הדלת (_el hadelet=to the door_) but the contracted form לדלת (_ladelet_).


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Flaminius said:


> Well, Meyer, I cannot say where because this phenomenon is all over the English-speaking countries. Here is a testimony of someone who lives in USA:


 
Last year as lachyear??  Perhaps this is more a dialect issue, as those combinations never occur around here.


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## Flaminius

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> Last year as lachyear??  Perhaps this is more a dialect issue, as those combinations never occur around here.


No no, Meyer.  It is "lastchear" with [s].  What occurs here is a somewhat mundane change as this: [tj] → [tʃ]

Listen to how Crystal says "this year" in AT&T Text-To-Speech Demo.  Charles utters "last year" a great deal like the observation I quoted above.  It's a pity that I could not get both virtual speakers say both phrases as I expected but I'd take that those auto-generated voices are very careful speeches.  I believe it sufficiently indicates that the phenomena would be more pronounced in natural conversations wherein the attention of the speakers is more to the content of the conversation than to the pronunciation.


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## se16teddy

Consonant mutation is a very important element of the Celtic languages.  When you learn Welsh as a foreign language, one of the first things you have to study is consonant mutation: the first consonant of many words changes according to position and other factors (with between two and four variants, depending on the consonant), so you need to know the mutations to be able to look anything up in a dictionary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_morphology


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Flaminius said:


> No no, Meyer. It is "lastchear" with [s]. What occurs here is a somewhat mundane change as this: [tj] → [tʃ]
> 
> Listen to how Crystal says "this year" in AT&T Text-To-Speech Demo. Charles utters "last year" a great deal like the observation I quoted above. It's a pity that I could not get both virtual speakers say both phrases as I expected but I'd take that those auto-generated voices are very careful speeches. I believe it sufficiently indicates that the phenomena would be more pronounced in natural conversations wherein the attention of the speakers is more to the content of the conversation than to the pronunciation.


 

I have asked my family members to say both 'last year' and 'this year' and the sounds do not change.  I will ask my English teachers about this combination as well and keep you informed on what they say.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> Hello everyone
> 
> I notice this change occurs because of the 'to', but are there any other such cases of this English and does this happen in other languages like Spanish, French, German, etc.? (also, are these occasional consonant changes listed/shown in the dictionaries?)


 
There's a similar change in colloquial French where an initial j  [ʒ] can shift into a [ʃ] because of a following [s]: _Je ne sais pas_ ( I do'nt know ) , [ʒən(ə)sɛpɑ] can be pronounced [ ʒɛpɑ ] : as _ne_ is often dropped in spoken language, the phrase becomes   [ʒəsɛpɑ] and [ ə ] tending to be mute, the voiced [ ʒ ] comes into contact with the unvoiced [s] and becomes unvoiced itself. So when a voiced consonant is followed by an unvoiced, it tends to lose its voiced feature.


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## PoliglotESSE

Such consonant mutations are a very common thing in Russian too. If you're interested in this question try to search for _*reduction, assimilation, accomodation*_. These are very basic terms in Phonetics. 
When you prepare your mouth for speaking it's _an excursion_. It means that all the organs there come to start articulating. When you finish articulating the organs come back to the neutral position. It's called _a recursion_. 
Generally such metamorphosis of speech (phonetic processes like reduction and so on) is explained by the fact that you don't have time to put your organs back after articulating one sound before articulating another one, i.e. there's no time to fulfil _recursion_ before next _excursion_. That's why just-pronounced sound stops in the middle and next sound begins also from this middle position, thus they both are affected. 
Of course it takes less than a second but I tried to explain it as clear as possible 

But this theory is fair only for a part of all reduced sounds. For example we can understand that it takes place at the end of the word if it's followed by another one, i.e. when the sound reduced is not the final one in the syntagm. For me it's more interesting why we reduce consonants at the end of the words when they don't have anything to be linked with. For example, in Russian such thing like differentiation between strong and weak consonants (e.g. [k] and [g], [p] and *, [f] and [v] etc.) helps to distinguish different words, i.e. it affects the meaning, compare: код [kod] - "code" and кот [kot] - "cat".*


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

J.F. de TROYES said:


> There's a similar change in colloquial French where an initial j [ʒ] can shift into a [ʃ] because of a following [s]: _Je ne sais pas_ ( I do'nt know ) , [ʒən(ə)sɛpɑ] can be pronounced [ ʒɛpɑ ] : as _ne_ is often dropped in spoken language, the phrase becomes [ʒəsɛpɑ] and [ ə ] tending to be mute, the voiced [ ʒ ] comes into contact with the unvoiced [s] and becomes unvoiced itself. So when a voiced consonant is followed by an unvoiced, it tends to lose its voiced feature.


 

I noticed this [ʒ] shift to a [ʃ] when I had to recite a poem by Victor Hugo from heart (Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne, je partirai, vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends, j'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne...etc.)


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## sakvaka

Yes, nasal assimilation is very common in spoken Finnish. Some examples:

_minun mielestäni_ -> _minummielestäni _("in my opinion")
_minun pitää_ -> _minumpitää_ ("I have to")
_meren rannalle_ -> _mererrannalle _("to the seashore")
_samanlainen_ -> _samallainen_ ("similar")
_kunpa_ -> _kumpa_ ("if only")

Some word forms are historical traces of it: _vuot_ + -_na_ -> _vuonna_ ("in the year"), _täyt_ + _-nä _-> _täynnä_ ("full of"), _tul_ + _-nut_ -> _tullut _("has come")


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## Demurral

PoliglotESSE said:


> . For me it's more interesting why we reduce consonants at the end of the words when they don't have anything to be linked with. For example, in Russian such thing like differentiation between strong and weak consonants (e.g. [k] and [g], [p] and *, [f] and [v] etc.) helps to distinguish different words, i.e. it affects the meaning, compare: код [kod] - "code" and кот [kot] - "cat".*


*

This may be also interesting to you. In Korean, there is a tendency to "unrelease" sounds at word-ending. So, one could have up to five words, that when pronounced alone, are totally equal. 
The sounds of [t], aspirated [t], fortis/glottalized [t], [s], fortis/glottalized [s] and  become an "unreleased [t]-sound" when they are at the end of a stand-alone word. You can only distinguish which word is which when in a compound word or when adding grammatical particles, moments these, when there is a liaison and the corresponding resillabication.

(I tried to explain it the best I could...)



Meyer Wolfsheim said:



			I have asked my family members to say both 'last year' and 'this year' and the sounds do not change.  I will ask my English teachers about this combination as well and keep you informed on what they say.
		
Click to expand...


The sound assimilation about which Flaminius is talking occurs in casual, or not careful, speech. When you ask your family to pronounce these words, even if they don't now why are you asking them to do so, they pay an especial attention to his proper pronounciation, and it is very unlikely that they pronounce the words the way they usually would.
Anyway, I don't know what is wrong here. How come that "got you!" becomes "gottcha!"? ---Same assimilation as in "last year"...not so usual, though.


Hope my post helped!

DeM *


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