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Simple question. How did the English word "possess" come to have a voiced "Z" sound for the first double-S?
Are there any other words that have this? Doesn't double-S consistently mean an unvoiced S sound, across a number of Germanic languages, English included?
Alex B’s excellent answer is correct and authoritative, but a bit heavy on technical language which many readers may not be familiar with. I’ll try to give a self-contained answer in slightly plainer language, summarising that answer together with some context from comments on the question, and answering OP’s specific questions directly — but this draws heavily on Alex B’s answer, and the sources linked there.
Possess is spelled with ss because it’s a loanword from French; in French it was spelled with ss to represent the unvoiced sound /s/, and the borrowed English spelling was modelled on the French. After borrowing to English, the /s/ changed pronunciation to /z/ because it’s between two vowels and following an unstressed syllable. This pronunciation change occurred fairly systematically in English around the 16th century, and so there are various other words like this, e.g. dessert, dissolve, example, Alexander. On the other hand, words borrowed later missed this change, so e.g. cassette is still pronounced with /s/ rather than /z/.
Here's a quote from Upward and Davidson 2011:
"Voicing of intervocalic /s/ to /z/, written s or ss, after an unstressed syllable in words such as desist, resist (compare the pronunciation of consist, insist), dessert, possess occurred in EModE, at first with both voiced and voiceless forms co-existing" (p. 189).
EModE stands for Early Modern English, i.e. c. 1476- c.1660 (Ibid, p. xiv), so in the much later French borrowings it was not operational e.g. in cassette (its first attested use in the OED goes back only to 1793 meaning 'casket').
Cf. Minkova 2014 (the online companion to her 2014 textbook, A historical phonology of English):
“Lack of stress and possibly ambisyllabic status will account for the voicing of [s] in the early Modern English voicing in French and Latin loans such as possess, dessert, dissolve, where the conditions of voicing replicate Verner’s Law (see 3.4.1). The prefix dis- was commonly voiced prevocalically in the eighteenth century – disarm, dishonour, disorder – but only disaster and disease maintain the voicing” (p. 24).
In the above-mentioned 2014 textbook she describes this change as
“a sixteenth-century tendency to voice fricatives after unstressed syllables, manifested in the voicing of /s/ to /z/ in loanwords, mostly, but not exclusively after prefixes – resign, transact, example, Alexander – and even against the spelling in possess, dessert, dissolve” (p. 66).
A note re: pronunciation of French example, exact etc.:
Obviously, the English words example and exact were borrowed a while ago, the first attested uses listed in the OED are
It’s important to note that Latin ex- changed in Old French to either ss (before a vowel) or s (before a consonant), see Zink 2013: 233. So we have
Latin exagium > French essai
Latin extendere > French étendre (cf. Old French estendre)
Whenever you see a French word beginning with ex-, it means it was either much later borrowed from Latin (like exact, -e ca. 1542) or its spelling was changed during the so called Erasmian reform (like exemple).
Latin exemplum > Old French es(s)ample, essemple
Note: Kibler 1984 “x in Latin represented the combination /k+s/; it may represent the same sound in Old French” (except in the word-final position where it stood for -us, p. 19)
Pierre Fouché in the third volume of his Phonétique historique du français (v. III Les consonnes et index général) mentions that in the sixteenth century, we encounter such forms in French as ezemple, euzemple, ezerice, euzecuter – which means those were pronounced with [z] (not [gz]!) in Middle French and up until the sixteenth century. Then during the Erasmian reform the kind of pronunciation closer to Latin was "restored" in such French words, cf.
« Il est vrai qu'à côté de egzemple, on a prononcé aussi eksemple. Cette prononciation était encore en usage du temps de Vaugelas (1647) qui la condamne d'ailleurs. Elle correspond à une prononciation plus savante du latin (=eksemplum), celle qui a été indiquée plus haut résultant d'un compromis avec la prononciation ancienne soit du français, soit du latin lui-même » (p. 874).
There are two questions.
Doesn't double-S consistently mean an unvoiced S sound, across a number of Germanic languages, English included?
That's irrelevant since the spelling does originate from a common Germanic parent. The spelling does not dictate the pronunciation, except in spelling pronounciation. Nor is there an obvious morphologic rule from Latin to apply.
Simple question. How did the English word "possess" come to have a voiced "Z" sound for the first double-S?
It doesn't? I mean, I didn't know it does.
The etymology that makes it cognate to potesse, potential is also no help since t is voiceless to begin with. Unless it should formally have been *testo with a *-d-* coda prefix, such as address vs. assent vs. ad-tention, it would have to be an English thing as determjned by @AlexB. However ...
Since the image of emperor stomping fallen guy is exceedingly common in ancient art (see eg. the Namor Stele), implying taking of PoW, I have no trouble believing that **ped- "step" (whence feet, pedes, etc.) is tangentially related, but I am pretty sure there are no authoritative sources to confirm this and I have no idea what to reconstruct in the bell end.
The German standard translation is besitzen, specifally besessen "possessed" (as of demons), indicating sed "sit" (cp. squat (a building)?).
Are there any other words that have this?
In Latin? How about English for a start, Boss? Buzz instead of booze, and consequently buzzed to show which is correct, thus the fuzz belongs to (voiced?) fuse (often spelled fuze, a circuit breaker, German Schütz, literally prötection?).
Geminate -zz- exists in many more words which spelling adheres to English pronunciation rather than the typical hypercorrect Lateinasation of i(s)land (which, if true and originally voiced, should become Ireland, a land of law, origin uncertain).
