Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 April 6

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April 6

Final ₩

Why is the final W silent in these German place names: Güstrow ([ˈɡʏstʁoː]), Malchow ([ˈmalço]), Pankow ([ˈpaŋkoː]), Teterow ([ˈteːtəʁoː]), Treptow ([ˈtʁeːptoː])? --79.49.55.131 (talk) 20:03, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Assimilation, I'd assume. By the way, it seems that most of these names would have been borrowed from Polabian or another Slavic language. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:49, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

de:-ow is a page on this subject, but it doesn't say why the w is silent. It comments that the o changes to the phoneme /o:/. The German Wiktionary has an entry for placenames ending in -ow, which says -off is an alternative pronunciation, but still doesn't explain why these names don't end in /v/. I'm not sure any German words do, so I guess that's assimilation, as Wakuran said.  Card Zero  (talk) 21:07, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

By the way, although it might be less relevant due to the dialectal situation in Germany and time passed, the article Standard German phonology states:

• Many German speakers use [ɛɪ̯] and [ɔʊ̯] as adaptations of the English diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ in English loanwords, according to Wiese (1996), or they replace them with the native German long vowels /eː/ and /oː/. Thus, the word okay may be pronounced [ɔʊ̯ˈkɛɪ̯] or /oːˈkeː/. However, Mangold (2005) and Krech et al. (2009) do not recognize these diphthongs as phonemes, and prescribe pronunciations with the long vowels /eː/ and /oː/ instead.

So, I assume the situation with Polabian -ow might be similar to the situation with English -ow, and unlike English, Polabian's been gone for so long now, that there's no motivation to pronounce the loaned name "correctly". 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:12, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Why it doesn't end in /v/ seems simply final-obstruent devoicing. Pronouncing voiced obstruents in final position is a bit hard, so many languages that have a voicing contrast devoice the obstruents in final position, merging them with their voiceless counterparts (/v/→/f/, /d/→/t/ etc.; Dutch is a pretty clean example of this), unless the voicing contrast wasn't a pure voicing contrast in the first place (like English). German is a bit mixed here: its phonemic voicing contrast is phonetically not a pure voicing contrast, but in final position it's merged anyway. Why this final /f/ was dropped, I don't know. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:26, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, when the Polabians had gone, it might possibly have been reanalyzed as '-ov', following German orthography, whereas the final-obstruent devoicing occurred, if I'm speculating. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:36, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

If Polabian phonology was like that of neighbouring Slavic languages (Polish, Czech), the final consonant was already devoiced to [f] in Polabian. Compare Polish Kraków [ˈkrakuf] and Czech Hronov [ˈɦronof]. How did Polish [ˈkrakuf] turn into German Krakau [ˈkʁaːkaʊ̯]?  --Lambiam 07:55, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

References

• Krech, Eva Maria; Stock, Eberhard; Hirschfeld, Ursula; Anders, Lutz-Christian (2009), Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-018202-6
• Mangold, Max (2005) [First published 1962], Das Aussprachewörterbuch (in German) (6th ed.), Mannheim: Dudenverlag, ISBN 978-3-411-04066-7
• Wiese, Richard (1996), The Phonology of German, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-824040-6