Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

presumably come into being, though it would likely be quite unstable, due to the resulting
durational similarity of the voiced portions of the vowels, which could lead to the
collapse of the quantity distinction. The reverse, on the other hand, is clearly attested.
Hyman cites Oromo and Tepehua as instances of such a system. In these languages,
where the short vowels are completely devoiced and the long vowels are glottalized, the
presence of any significant voiced period, even if somewhat abbreviated by the glottal
adduction gesture, would be sufficient to distinguish long from short, making a
perceptually more stable system. Devoicing of both long and short final vowels is
reasonably common (with the proviso that the long vowel is only partially devoiced).
This is in fact the system described by Sapir for Southern Paiute (Sapir 1930). In
Southern Paiute final long vowels are partially devoiced or shortened, and short vowels
are realized voiceless or completely elided. This is essentially the pattern termed “Final
Mora-Clipping” by Hayward (1998). Hayward is referring here to any system in which a
final long vowel is shortened or partially weakened in some way (a bimoraic vowel
becomes monomoraic), and a short vowel is severely reduced or deleted (a monomoraic
vowel goes away). Southern Paiute had conserved the pattern of “Final Mora-
Devoicing”, which obviously gave rise to the alternate pattern of actual “clipping” or
deletion. Many languages exhibit this latter pattern, which I assume is a reflex of a
devoicing pattern in most cases. Languages such as Latvian (Matthiessen 1997), Maltese
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