# Unacceptable  final /-u/ in German?



## Linnets

Hi, I noticed in German there's a tendency to avoid final /-u/ in foreign words such as _Aino_, _Urdo_ and so on. Is there a phonological restraint or is it just a casual fashion?


----------



## elroy

I’m confused by your question.

These words are spelled _Ainu_ and _Urdu_ in German.

And there are other German words/names ending in /u/: _Tabu_, _Tofu_, _Akku_, _Peru_.

There are no phonotactic constraints against a word ending in /u/.  

Let me know if I’ve misunderstood your question.


----------



## Linnets

elroy said:


> These words are spelled _Ainu_ and _Urdu_ in German.


I found one or two times these words spelled _Aino_ and _Urdo_, hence my question.



elroy said:


> And there are other German words/names ending in /u/: _Tabu_, _Tofu_, _Akku_, _Peru_.


Right, I forgot _Akku_! 



elroy said:


> There are no phonotactic constraints against a word ending in /u/.


OK, forget it.


----------



## elroy

Well, you may still be on to something.  _Akku_ is a clipping of _Akkumulator_ (which is not a native German word anyway), and none of the others are native German words.  So there may actually be a phonotactic constraint against word-final [u] that applies to native German words.  However, this constraint, if it exists, clearly doesn’t mean that borrowings or clippings with word-final [u] are obligatorily adapted to obey the constraint. 

A similar situation is that in Palestinian Arabic, [v] is not found in any native words, but a number of foreign words, like _video_ and _Vienna_, are nevertheless pronounced with the original [v] sound.


----------



## berndf

elroy said:


> Well, you may still be on to something.  _Akku_ is a clipping of _Akkumulator_ (which is not a native German word anyway), and none of the others are native German words.  So there may actually be a phonotactic constraint against word-final [u] that applies to native German words.


This applies to to all full vowels and has nothing particular to do with u. The vowels in final unstressed vowels were all reduced to Schwa centuries ago. Apart from monosyllabic words, most words ending in a full vowels are either abbreviations, loans or neologisms.


----------



## Sobakus

What elroy describes doesn't look like a phonotactic constraint, but simply a statistical accident. For historical reasons that berndf mentions, German native vocabulary doesn't have final unstressed vowels different from schwa, so words where these are present are non-native in at least some sense. Romance, Slavic and Greek borrowings generally net the vowels a/o/i/e. None of these languages have a phonotactic restriction on final /u/, but in all of them taken together /u/ is the rarest final vowel in non-inflected forms. German has rather frequent final /o/ in semi-native vocabulary, specifically in personal names and colloquial nicknames with the suffix -o, like _ein Normalo_ “a normie”.

This statistical fact can influence the natives to recall rarely heard words that end in /u/ as ending in /o/, but this is mophonological replacement, and not phonotactic. When correctly recalled, the forms in /u/ pose no problems in pronunciation.


----------



## elroy

Sobakus said:


> What elroy describes doesn't look like a phonotactic constraint





Sobakus said:


> When correctly recalled, the forms in /u/ pose no problems in pronunciation.


Phonotactic constraints are not about pronounceability.  They are about theoretically possible phonological phenomena that nevertheless do not occur in the language, for whatever reason.  Those that occur in foreign words only are of course pronounceable by native speakers, but to me this doesn’t preclude saying that there is a phonotactic constraint against their occurrence in native words.



Sobakus said:


> in all of them taken together /u/ is the rarest final vowel in non-inflected forms.


I’ve always wondered about the rarety of unstressed word-final /u/ in Spanish: _espíritu_ and _tribu_ are the only words I can think of that have one.


----------



## Sobakus

elroy said:


> I’ve always wondered about the rarety of unstressed word-final /u/ in Spanish: _espíritu_ and _tribu_ are the only words I can think of that have one.


Well, final /u/ has simply been eliminated in medieval Western Romance with the disappearance of the 4th declension, and then of case inflection altogether. In Latin already, this vowel was absolutely the rarest word-finally, appearing just in two inflected forms of the rarest and most unstable declension class, and in the extremely idiomatically constrained ū-supine (a verbal form).

Ibero-Romance went even further than most by eliminating the distinction between word-final /i/ and /e/, and Spanish unsuccessfully tried getting rid of word-final o's, as Catalan successfully did.


----------



## berndf

Sobakus said:


> Well, final /u/ has simply been eliminated in medieval Western Romance with the disappearance of the 4th declension


On top of a relative rarity of final -_u_ because of the _u/ō_ merger into _o_ in Proto-Romance (_-um > -o_).


----------



## Sobakus

elroy said:


> Phonotactic constraints are not about pronounceability.  They are about theoretically possible phonological phenomena that nevertheless do not occur in the language, for whatever reason.  Those that occur in foreign words only are of course pronounceable by native speakers, but to me this doesn’t preclude saying that there is a phonotactic constraint against their occurrence in native words.


Wait, phono-tactics not about pronounceability? Do you not think phonotactics refers to a rule/constraint-governed phonological phenomenon? For whatever reason? Then what's the difference between phonotactics and a statistical fluke? Again, do you not think it has a neurolinguistic basis?

Would you call the situation with final non-schwa in German “a phonotactic constraint on full vowels in native vocabulary”? And what exactly is native vocabulary, does it have some neurolinguistic basis, i.e. is it part of a different linguistic system in some sense? Do different parts of speech have separate phonotactics, because for example there's no noun form that ends in some particular vowel that only occurs in verbal forms?


----------



## Sobakus

berndf said:


> On top of a relative rarity of final -_u_ because of the _u/ō_ merger into _o_ in Proto-Romance (_-um > -o_).


I sort of meant to say that since Western Romance /u/ ostensibly only comes from /ū/, the only place it might have existed is the 4th declension, but that got eliminated. But actually, there are pockets of varieties that distinguish between final u/ō on opposite sides of the Romance world, in Northern/Western Iberia (Cantabria, Asturia) and in southern Italy (southern Lazio, Marche, Lucania). These not only have -o in verbs (_canto_) vs -u in nouns (_nasu_), but also a distinction between -u and -o in nouns, where -o is found in uncountable mass nouns which are sometimes called “neuter”, sometimes just “third gender”. This -o doesn't cause metaphony (raising/diphthongisation) in either nouns or verbs, while /u/ does, being a [+high] vowel. The most attractive explanation of this third gender is as coming from Dat/Abl -ō, as distinct from Nom/Acc. This third gender continues the Latin neuter not only in its meaning, but in the fact that it forms/ed the plural in -a. The remnants of these a-plurals are still found all over the Romance world, and the whole declension class is alive and well in large parts of Italy even tough in most varieties it doesn't have a distinct ending in the singular.

So, basically, the elimination of final /u/ may be less phonetic and more morphological than traditionally thought – most varieties conflated the two Late Latin genders and picked the less marked vowel among the two, which is /o/. (But the Portuguese/Catalan reduction of this /o/ to [ u ] looks suspiciously like a remnant of this variation.)


----------



## Coffeemachtspass

Du 

I rest my case.


----------



## OBrasilo

For what it's worth, I've seen the same tendency in Slovenian - I've even seen the UHU glue brand miswritten as UHO or OHO because of that, due to people commonly mispronouncing it that way.


----------



## berndf

Coffeemachtspass said:


> Du
> 
> I rest my case.





berndf said:


> *Apart from monosyllabic words*, most words ending in a full vowels are either abbreviations, loans or neologisms.


----------



## Hutschi

I used a rhyme finder. There are many words ending with "uh" in singular and "uhe/ühe" in plural.
Kuh, Kühe, Schuh, Schuhe, 
See also:
ruh, ruhe

This is a class of words rhyming perfectly with words ending with "u".
Haiku, ruh, immerzu, Schuh, Uhu


----------



## Linnets

elroy said:


> Phonotactic constraints are not about pronounceability.


In fact, in Italian final unstressed /u/ is perfectly pronounceable, but has been constantly avoided throughout its history.



elroy said:


> I’ve always wondered about the rarety of unstressed word-final /u/ in Spanish: _espíritu_ and _tribu_ are the only words I can think of that have one.


In Traditional Italian (until circa mid XX century) even foreign words unstressed on the final syllable, got an un-etymological word-final stressed /u/ e.g. _tabù_, _gurù_, _zulù_.


----------



## Penyafort

elroy said:


> I’ve always wondered about the rarety of unstressed word-final /u/ in Spanish: _espíritu_ and _tribu_ are the only words I can think of that have one.



Those few you'll find are always going to be straight from Latin (_ímpetu_, _impromptu_), loanwords from other languages (_haiku _or _tofu _from Japanese, _aurresku _or _chistu _from Basque, _quipu _or _aillu _from Quichua, _caucháu _or _llaulláu _from Mapuche, _bou_ from Catalan, _mildiu _from English, _tau _from Greek, _wau _from Hebrew, etc), interjections (_chau, guau, jau, miau_, etc) or shortened words (_ecu, diu_, etc)


----------



## Sobakus

Linnets said:


> In fact, in Italian final unstressed /u/ is perfectly pronounceable, but has been constantly avoided throughout its history.
> 
> In Traditional Italian (until circa mid XX century) even foreign words unstressed on the final syllable, got an un-etymological word-final stessed /u/ e.g. _tabù_, _gurù_, _zulù_.


This is clearly due to morphological reasons – /u/ is the only vowel in Italian without a morphological function or a corresponding noun class, therefore it has to be part of the stem, and all native words where the final vowel is part of the stem instead of the ending are stressed on that final stem vowel. Traditional Italian made sense until the prescriptivists spoiled everything!

Also, in Italy, final unstressed /u/ and /o/ are still in a sort of competition and correspond to each other (have the same morphosyntactic function) in the different dialects, except in those that preserve them as distinct to mark the third gender, as I describe in #11. So when a Tuscan native who's not been spoiled by prescriptivist education hears a word ending in an unstressed /u/, they should more or less automatically equate it to their Tuscan /o/.

Moreover, already in Tuscany, and certainly to the south of it, these endings get pronounced sometimes closer to /o/ and sometimes to /u/ without any difference in function – as can be heard here.


----------

