Abstract

The terms "fester" and "loser Anschluss" define two different ways of linking a stressed vowel with an immediately following consonant. This distinction appears mostly in Germanic languages, in words like "Mitte" vs. "Miete". The present paper sums up the landmarks of the long history of this phenomenon. Its first descriptions were intuitive and based on auditory impressions; later investigations, experimental in nature, aimed at finding acoustic and physiological correlates of the perceptual dimension of "Anschluss". It is the author's belief that further studies are necessary both to ascertain which non-Germanic languages show the distinction between "fester" and "loser Anschluss" and to determine the phonetic vs. phonological status of the feature in each language.