From: tgpedersen
Message: 25368
Date: 2003-08-27
> I'm sorry to hear you think that is "sheer nonsense" (seedetails).
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/21817> for more
>(at least
> Why would asyllabic endings like *-s, *-t become voiced *-z, *-d
> when not sentence final)? I did not address that issue in message21817,
> but it's not terribly difficult to come up with a possibleexplanation.
> The phenomenon occurs at a morpheme boundary (e.g. *pod-z, *to-d).If
> morpheme boundaries were previously word-boundaries (that's tehprinciple
> of agglutination), then perhaps there was some overt prosodicalmarking of
> the word/morpheme boundary, such as a rise in pitch, or a glottalstød.
> Phonetically [pá:d?s], [ta:?t]. With syllabic endings (e.g. Gen.trace, "absorbed by the
> *[pa:d?ás] or perhaps, depending on the exact time-frame, an earlier
> *[pa:dá?si]), the feature simply vanished without a
> vowel". In the vowelless ("strong") endings, however, the resultwas
> voicing of the consonant: [pá:d?s] > [pod-z] > [po:dz], [ta:?t] >[to-d].
>Perhaps this might provide a way to fix the Verner conundrum of s > z