2854: Problems with S- (part 2): Germanic Oct 13, 2024

From the Atlantic coast of Portugal all the way through to much of Central Europe, you will not find many native words beginning with [sp] or [st], or even [sk] sounds. This was explored yesterday in Romance languages. In German, the sounds ST and SP are not possible, and realized as [ʃt] and [​​ʃp] (like SH-p/t) even though the spelling would indicate otherwise. Technically, SK is also not really possible, and morphed into Sch [ʃ] (just SH-). This is true at the start of syllables, not just words.  All of this is also true of Yiddish although that uses a different writing system. 

But otherwise it does not really look like other Germanic languages struggle with this; after all English and, say, Afrikaans are replete with words beginning with S+  -T, -P, or -K. While these will not have the same difficulty exactly, things are not so simple.

In English, the stops after S are referred to as being clear, meaning that they are not denoted as having much aspiration (as would be found if it was the first sound of a word) nor are they glottalized at all as might happen at the end. For clarity, say a word like ‘pop’ or ‘tot’ and realize that the first consonant doesn’t sound exactly like the second. The trouble with these clear plosives is that they also are not clearly voiced, and so while in the other languages looked at here the S has changes, in English the other vowels change. For instance, it is not clear that the word ‘stop’ is pronounced [stɒp] or voiced as [sdɒp] (with a [d]).

This is taken to a further extreme in Afrikaans, where these stops are losing voicing entirely, except in between vowels, in a system that closer resembles tones, where the sounds are differentiated by pitch. Admittedly this is not a problem only for plosives following S. 

You can read more about what’s going on in Afrikaans (not from Word Facts): here.