I can't think of any specific examples of this sort of change in a Germanic language at the moment, but of course, that certainly doesn't mean there aren't any! I'll keep thinking and will try to look further into it, though, and I'll post again here in this thread if I find something.Salmoneus wrote: ↑05 Apr 2024 00:39In my conlang, Middle Wenthish, a Germanic language, I voice consonants after long vowels - and, since this isn't something that comes naturally to me or that I've done in any other language, I presume I had a good reason for this based on something Germanic-y I read about. But I'm afraid I don't know what it was anymore!
The correlation of longer vowels before voiced consonants (not just codas) is apparently valid in English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Lithuanian, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Telugu, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean, and with some exceptions in Welsh. The opposite correlation is allegedly not known of in any language.
And there are several studies out there showing that speakers of various languages take vowel length as a cue to interpret voicing - if you play people a longer vowel followed by a voiceless consonant, they'll often hear a voiced consonant. Which in theory SHOULD make it really easy for length to lead to voicing...
...but I'll admit I'm a bit concerned that there aren't a heap of obvious examples of this actually happening in any language!
What does immediately come to mind for me is that, according to Wikipedia, voiceless obstruents underwent lenition in the Anatolian languages "between unstressed syllables and following long vowels. The two can be considered together as a lenition rule between unstressed morae, if long vowels are analyzed as a sequence of two vowels".