1110: Lack of Assimilation Dec 23, 2017

One feature of words in certain languages such as German that can help to make make the distinction between words easier to understand is that assimilation there does change when there is compounding. For instance, an 'sp-' and 'st-' in the middle of words are pronounced as [sp] and [st] respectively, but at the start of words they become [ʃp] and [ʃt] (like SH). This assimilation, however, is maintained when there is a prefix, or if it is the second element in a compound, even if this requires a glottal stop. Therefore, while the affixes are not a different word, nor are compounds multiple words, the individual elements are mostly preserved. This does not happen in languages like French.