Back to Matrix [ʑ] → [dʲ] Edit this Data

[dʲ]→[ʑ]Certainty: 4/5Commonality: 2/5

Spirantization Affrication Deaffrication Palatalization West Slavic Slavic Japonic

Palatalized voiced alveolar plosive to Voiced alveolo-palatal fricative

The palatalized voiced stop [dʲ] becomes the voiced alveolo-palatal fricative [ʑ]. The change is not a single step: [dʲ] first affricates to [dʑ], and the affricate then loses its stop closure (deaffrication). Lower Sorbian shows the full chain: West Slavic soft *dʲ became dź [dʑ], as it still is in Polish and Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian then reduced dź to ź [ʑ], so Upper Sorbian dźeń 'day' corresponds to Lower Sorbian źeń. Japanese took a parallel route before [i]: Old Japanese /di/ was affricated to [dʑi] and then merged with /zi/, realized as fricative [ʑi] especially between vowels.

Phonetic Effects

Spirantization, Affrication, Deaffrication

Language Examples

Lower Sorbian West Slavic

*dʲenʲ → dźeń [dʑɛɲ]→źeń [ʑɛɲ]— Soft *dʲ first became the affricate dź (kept in Upper Sorbian dźeń and Polish dzień), and Lower Sorbian then lost the stop closure. This happened in the western dialects around the mid-16th century and about a century later in the east.

dźiwy [dʑiwɨ]→źiwy [ʑiwɨ]— Upper Sorbian keeps the affricate (dźiwi). Lower Sorbian keeps dź after a dental fricative, as in pozdźej 'later', so the change is blocked in that position.

Japanese Japonic

hanadi [hanadi] (鼻血)→hanaji [hanaʑi]— /di/ (ぢ) became [dʑi] and merged with /zi/ (じ) in the yotsugana merger. The merged sound is [(d)ʑi], with the fricative [ʑ] usual between vowels in Standard Japanese.

Related Transformations

Reverse

More Slavic Shifts

[a] → [ə] — Vowel Reduction [b] → [bʲ] — Palatalization [b] → [v] — Spirantization [tɕ] → [ʃ] — De-affrication [tɕ] → [ɕ] — Lenition

Sources & References

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