Re: Voicing and Plurality

En réponse à Jake X <alwaysawake247@...>:

>
> *I used -sho- for you pl. because zo is to easy to confuse with so.
>
You must have a strange hearing...

> As you can see, the pl. pronoun particles are voiced versions (except
> sho)
> of their singular counterparts. I've been thinking of extending that to
> form
> plural nouns (which until then were only indicated by the plurality of
> the
> verb). Does anyone know of any other langs with this feature (voiced
> plurality)? The only thing I can think of are some german plurals that
> use
> an umlaut as the change (IMO |oe| is phonetically isolated from |o|,
> but
> connected through notation).
>
Well, the Celtic mutations come in mind, but they usually work differently.
Still, it's quite naturalistic in my opinion, and you can easily create a chain
of events that brings initial voicing to mark plurality: imagine that in a
former state your language didn't distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants,
and the plural was marked by some vocalic unstressed prefix (i- for instance,
or e- like in my Maggel for neuter nouns). Also, in this language consonants
got voiced when following a vowel (or maybe between vowels), so that prefix is
always accompanied by phonetic voicing of consonants. Now with time the prefix
disappears (not improbable when the prefix is unstressed), leaving only the
voiced consonant to alternate with a voiceless consonant to mark number. This
is a pretty common behaviour, and you get very naturalistically initial voicing
marking number.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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