Re: Success and Failure

In a message dated 7/6/00 4:44:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
daniel.andreasson@TELIA.COM writes:

> May I ask how this came to be? I know some Chadic languages mark
>  the plural by devoicing the first consonant, probably due to
>  an earlier gemination:
>
>     digra > ddigra > ttigra > tigra
>
>  Or something like this. I don't have my papers around.
>
>  Otherwise I really like the success and failure feature and I'll
>  even try and incorporate it in one of my own langs if that's okey.
>  I think you have a very well thought out system.
>

Initially I simply wanted this feature in my language, but I soon wanted to
justify it, so I came up with this:  In a previous language of mine, past and
future tense markings were simply mirror images of each other,  and so it was
in proto-rodnús, making the tenses:

fobed - leave (present tense)
ne-fobed - left (pronounced /n@'vobEd/)
fobed-en - will leave (/fo'bEd@n/)

eventually, the initial ne- disappeared, leaving only the voicing.  as for
how all the medial consonants OF STEMS became voiced while grammatical
affixes can be either voiced or unvoiced, I haven't quite worked that out yet.

Joe Mondello