Re: Voicing and Plurality

Pablo David Flores writes:
 > JS Bangs <jaspax@...> writes:
 >
 > > I have a hazily-recollected thought that Ancient Chinese had such a
 > > feature--or some other grammatical feature indicated by voicing the
 > > initial consonant.
 >
 > Ancient Chinese (or whatever you call the old members of that
 > language family) had, IIRC, initial consonant alternation serving
 > several grammatical purposes. In particular, there was an *{s-}
 > prefix which was used to add a causative aspect to a verb. This
 > prefix was apparently lost later, but before that it produced
 > changes in the following consonant (devoicing: */sb/ -> /p/,
 > or metathesis: */st/ -> /ts/). This is all something I vaguelly
 > recall from an article I read once, but I think the basics are
 > right. In fact, I've been toying with the idea of a language
 > like that myself, where alternation plays a more important
 > role than affixation.
 >
Okay, I don't know Classical Chinese, but I can quote something from
this book I have here.

one again, it's...

_Concise Compendium of the World's Languages_ by George L. Campbell

In the section _CHINESE, CLASSICAL (Wenli)_

!Verb
!
!The presence of paired verbs has been pointed out (e.g. Yaxontov 1965:
!36) which are homonyms in Modern Chinese but which varied in
!pronunciation in the early Classical language due to the presence, in
!one member of the pair, of a causative or resultative formant.  For
!example:
!
!
![hanzi]  reconstructed as _dhi@r_ 'to see, look at'; modern reading
!         _shi_;
!
![hanzi]  reconstructed as _dhi@s_ 'to show, exhibit'; modern reading
!         _shi_;
!
!
!
![hanzi]  reconstructed as _dhen_ 'field'; modern reading _tia'n_;
!
![hanzi]  reconstructed as _dhens_ 'to till the land'; modern reading
!         _tia'n_;
!
!This phenomenon has been taken as evidence for an early Chinese
!inflectional system which was in desuetude by the Han period.

These appear to be suffixes rather than prefixes discussed above, but
this is obviously a very cursory treatment of the phenomenon - there
may be others that had prefixes.

If anyone desperately wants the characters, I can describe them or do
ASCII art or see if I can find them in a Japanese kanji dictionary,
but I don't see much point.

Replies