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Re: vowel harmony extension?

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Thursday, November 2, 2000, 22:59
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