Jiří Pilarský:
Auslautverhärtung als strukturtypisches Merkmal des Donausprachbundes?
Abstract:
There is a rather compact language area passing Middle Europe from the west to the east and delimited by the shared feature of devoicing word-/morpheme-final obstruents (“Auslautverhärtung”, AV). It is a phonetically motivated phenomenon that can be considered to be a language universal. However, its concrete manifestation form in various phonological systems is not identical, 2 AV types and 3 AV relevance degrees are to be distinguished. This area is significant only from the point of view of inter-systemic areal linguistics as a zone of inter-linguistic interference affecting languages of more areal types. After a detailed review of AV phenomena both in the languages of the Central European areal type and those of the contact zone this paper evaluates the areal typological weight of AV for the mentioned areal type. It regards the attempts to consider AV to be a part of the shared cluster of isoglosses of the Central European (“Danube”) areal type as erroneous.
