Re: Voicing and Plurality

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.


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

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