As with final consonant devoicing, we describe both morphophonological alternations segmentally, even though they clearly involve feature switching (Wiese (1996a, 200) demonstrates with reference to the devoicing of the foreign word Orange /o:raNS/ that a featural definition best captures the phenomenon). Lengthening is a change in the length feature (and/or the tense feature) whilst umlaut fronts back vowels. Although a segmental description misses the featural generalizations, our approach can be readily extended to a featural level of description, as discussed in Cahill (1993) and Gibbon (1989). Recasting the phonological and morphophonological components of our description featurally would not be difficult to do but it would make it much harder for the reader to follow the formal presentation. It would thus obscure the analysis of German noun inflection that is our main focus here.
In our account, umlaut and lengthening are no different in their roles from any other stem alternation or, indeed, from affixation. Any noun class has its inflected forms given by equations which may specify the suffix that appears, or a stem alternation, or both.
