Re: Voicing and Plurality

Tim May <butsuri@...> writes:

> _Concise Compendium of the World's Languages_ by George L. Campbell
<snip>
> 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.
I just found this buried in the depts of my hard drive, apparently from
www.britannica.com in the good ol' times when you didn't have to pay at
all to read these...

<article>
Most Sino-Tibetan languages possess or can be shown to have at one time
possessed derivational and morphological affixes--i.e., word elements
attached before or after or within the main stem of a word that change
or modify the meaning in some way. Many prefixes can be reconstructed
for Proto-Sino-Tibetan: s- (causative), m- (intransitive), b-, d-, g-,
and r-, and many more for certain language divisions and units. Among
the suffixes, -s (used with several types of verbs and nouns), -t, and
-n are inherited from the protolanguage. The problem of whether Proto-
Sino-Tibetan made use of -r- and -l- infixes (besides perhaps semivocalic
infixes) has not been solved. Whether clusters containing these sounds
were the result of prefixation to roots beginning in r and l (and y) or
came about through infixation is not clear.


Initial consonant alternation

Voiced and voiceless initial stops alternate in the same root in many
Sino-Tibetan languages, including Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetan (voiced
in intransitive, voiceless in transitive verbs). The German Oriental
scholar August Conrady linked this morphological system to the causative
s- prefix, which was supposed to have caused devoicing of voiced stops.
(Voicing is the vibration of the vocal cords, as occurs, for example, in
the sounds b, d, g, z, and so on. Devoicing, or voicelessness, is the
pronunciation of sounds without vibration of the vocal cords, as in p,
t, k, s.) Such alternating of the initial consonant cannot itself be
reconstructed for the protolanguage.
</article>

It's clear that Sino-Tibetan languages were quite inflecting, in any
case. I don't know anything about Tibetan, except that its writing
system is extremely conservative and transliteration seems to follow
it; I guess most of those lost affixes are still visible in the
written language but not in the spoken form. Anyone?


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/ego/pdf/ng/index.html

Reply