Boundaries as obstruents: Old English voicing assimilation and universal strength hierarchies

I. The facts about the behaviour of fricatives in Old English in relation to surrounding segments are well known; but these facts (and some others) illustrate some interesting general principles that seem not to have been thoroughly discussed. A classic formulation of the data is that of Sweet (1953: 3): … f and s , in addition to their modern values, could represent respectively the sounds of v and z , letters which were not normally used in O.E. These three letters, f, s, p , had the sounds of f, s , and th in thin (‘breathed’ or ‘voiceless’) initially and finally in accented words; next to ‘voiceless’ consonants (such as p, t ); and when double; … They had the sounds of v, z , and th in then (‘voiced’) when single between vowels, or between a vowel and another ‘voiced’ sound (such as l, r, m, n )…. To generalize this, we might say that in Old English fricatives were voiced between sonorants, and voiceless if geminate or contiguous to a major boundary, or in clusters with voiceless obstruents (of which as we will see geminates are a special case). One way of capturing these facts would be a rule which states simply that fricatives are voiced between sonorants, and voiceless elsewhere.