Re: vowel harmony extension?

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 05:06:22PM -0700, SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY wrote:
> > I'm not aware of any harmony, but there is disharmony. In Old Japanese you
> > can only have one voiced consonant per word. If you compound two words
> > which both have voiced consonants, then the second one must devoice.
>
> AH! So that's how that is. I've been wondering for quite some time how
> to know whether to voice the first consonant of the second word or not. Do
> you mean all the voiced consonants in the second word devoice, or just the
> first consonant of it? In any case, I'm really fond of that feature. It's
> especially cool in reduplicated words, because I like reduplication but only
> when you modify the word somewhat, because it sounds silly to me to say have
> the same exact sequence of sounds repeated twice :)
[snip]
In Korean reduplication (which is fairly common) I am not aware of any
modification to the word.  But it never sounded silly to me, probably
because I grew up with it.  Reduplication in English, OTOH, sounds silly
to me.  Cultural bias, I guess.

YHL