2025

Scando-Slavica

Journal year: 2025 | Journal volume: 71 | Journal number: 1

scientific article

english

EN In Lower Sorbian, morpheme-initial /w/ in front of was affected by a weakening to [h] and, eventually, to zero. Consequently, an optional pronunciation with the glottal stop in place of the original [w] emerged. The analysed data, representing the speech of the last Lower Sorbian native speaker generation, shows a coexistence of true zero with glottal stop, glottalisation, [h], and [w] as reflexes of the original [w]. This variation is largely free but partially conditioned by the phonological and morphological context, with a different variant distribution depending on the right-hand context, as well as a distinct treatment of word-internal and word-initial structures. However, the weakening/elimination of /w/ is a purely phonetic phenomenon and the underlying /w/ remains consistently preserved.

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10.1080/00806765.2025.2478549

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00806765.2025.2478549?scroll=top&needAccess=true

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