pronounced as /notice/
In phonology, voicing (or sonorization) is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or desonorization. Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel.
For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced pronounced as /[s]/ when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and pronounced as /[z]/ when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). This type of assimilation is called progressive, where the second consonant assimilates to the first; regressive assimilation goes in the opposite direction, as can be seen in have to pronounced as /[hæftə]/.
English no longer has a productive process of voicing stem-final fricatives when forming noun-verb pairs or plural nouns, but there are still examples of voicing from earlier in the history of English:
Synchronically, the assimilation at morpheme boundaries is still productive, such as in:
The voicing alternation found in plural formation is losing ground in the modern language,. Of the alternations listed below many speakers retain only the pronounced as /[f-v]/ pattern, which is supported by the orthography. This voicing of pronounced as //f// is a relic of Old English, at a time when the unvoiced consonants between voiced vowels were 'colored' by an allophonic voicing (lenition) rule pronounced as //f// → pronounced as /[v]/. As the language became more analytic and less inflectional, final vowels or syllables stopped being pronounced. For example, modern knives is a one syllable word instead of a two syllable word, with the vowel e not pronounced and no longer part of the word's structure. The voicing alternation between pronounced as /[f]/ and pronounced as /[v]/ occurs now as realizations of separate phonemes pronounced as //f// and pronounced as //v//. The alternation pattern is well maintained for the items listed immediately below, but its loss as a productive allophonic rule permits its abandonment for new usages of even well-established terms: while leaf~leaves in reference to 'outgrowth of plant stem' remains vigorous, the Toronto ice hockey team is uncontroversially named the Maple Leafs.
The following mutations are optional:
Sonorants (pronounced as //l r w j//) following aspirated fortis plosives (that is, pronounced as //p t k// in the onsets of stressed syllables unless preceded by pronounced as //s//) are devoiced such as in please, crack, twin, and pewter.
Several varieties of English have a productive synchronic rule of /t/-voicing whereby intervocalic /t/ not followed by a stressed vowel is realized as voiced alveolar flap [ɾ], as in tutor, with the first /t/ pronounced as voiceless aspirated [tʰ] and the second as voiced [ɾ]. Voiced phoneme /d/ can also emerge as [ɾ], so that tutor and Tudor may be homophones, both with [ɾ] (the voiceless identity of word-internal /t/ in tutor is manifested in tutorial, where stress shift assures [tʰ]).
See main article: Assimilation (linguistics). In many languages, including Polish and Russian, there is anticipatory assimilation of unvoiced obstruents immediately before voiced obstruents. For example, Russian Russian: про'''сь'''ба 'request' is pronounced pronounced as //ˈprozʲbə// (instead of pronounced as /
In Italian, pronounced as //s// before a voiced consonant is pronounced pronounced as /[z]/ within any phonological word: Italian: sbaglio pronounced as /[ˈzbaʎʎo]/ 'mistake', Italian: slitta pronounced as /[ˈzlitta]/ 'sled', Italian: snello pronounced as /[ˈznɛllo]/ 'slender'. The rule applies across morpheme boundaries (Italian: disdire pronounced as /[dizˈdiːre]/ 'cancel') and word boundaries (Italian: lapis nero pronounced as /[ˌlaːpizˈneːro]/ 'black pencil'). This voicing is productive and so it applies also to borrowings, not only to native lexicon: Italian: snob pronounced as /[znɔb]/.
See main article: Final-obstruent devoicing. Final devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Catalan.[1] Such languages have voiced obstruents in the syllable coda or at the end of a word become voiceless.
Initial voicing is a process of historical sound change in which voiceless consonants become voiced at the beginning of a word. For example, modern German German: sagen pronounced as /[ˈzaːɡn̩]/, Yiddish Yiddish: זאָגן|rtl=yes pronounced as /[ˈzɔɡn̩]/, and Dutch Dutch; Flemish: zeggen pronounced as /[ˈzɛɣə]/ (all "say") all begin with pronounced as /[z]/, which derives from pronounced as /[s]/ in an earlier stage of Germanic, as is still attested in English say, Swedish Swedish: säga pronounced as /[ˈsɛjːa]/, and Icelandic Icelandic: segja pronounced as /[ˈseiːja]/. Some English dialects were affected as well, but it is rare in Modern English. One example is fox (with the original consonant) compared to vixen (with a voiced consonant).