Re: Plural vowel change

On Wed, 27 Jan 1999 17:05:14 +0100 Daniel Andreasson
<noldo@...> writes:
>Hello fellow conlangers!
>I have a question (my first ever, yey! :)
>In my conlang Rinya, the plural is marked by changing the vowel(s) =
>inside the word. The question is: What is the normal way of doing
>this? Or is there a 'normal' way at all?
>Of course I could just make a pattern up, but if all existing
>languages =
>that have this feature do it the same way, it would be interesting to
>know.
>Do the vowels change from back to front or from open/low to
>close/high? =
>And if the latter, what happens if the word is for instance 'cin'?
>Would =
>that be 'can' in the plural and go back to open/low again?
>Or does it have something to do with the preceding consonant?=20
>And what about diphthongs like 'ae' and 'oe'?
>As you can see, I have no clue at all. Please help! :)
>Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.
>/ Daniel Andreasson
Well, in Hebrew, because the accent of the word falls on the last
syllable in plurals, some of the weaker vowels collapse into a shva-na`
(schwa /@/) when they are too far from the stressed syllable, in this
case the plural suffix.

/'kElEv/ (dog) >>> /k@la'vim/ (dogs)
/Sa'mar/ (he guarded) >>> /S@mar'tem/ (you [pl.m.] guarded)
/ba'raq/ (lightning) >>> /b@ra'qim/ (lightnings)


-Stephen (Steg)

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