Re: Plural vowel change

Hello all.

First of all, I want to send a big thank you to all who helped me with =
this. And especially to Ray Brown who provided more information than I =
could ever dream of.

If nothing else, Rinya will at least have an excellent system of marking =
the plural. :)

And concerning vowel height, I think Kristian's way is the way to go. =
Open/close when 4 levels and high/mid/low when 3 levels.

This mail contains comments from both Ray's and Steg's replies.

> You could, e.g. an original plural ending -a (like, e.g.=20
> neuter plurals in Latin), which cause vowels to move lower,=20
> so, e.g. you could have: kin - ken; tun - ton.
>=20
> I've never come across it, but there is no reason why you=20
> couldn't have had an original plural ending in -u which=20
> then cause front vowels to move to the back;
The problem is that it is very hard (for most people) to distinguish =
between unrounded _front_ vowels and unrounded _back_ vowels. Although =
the rounded ones are easier to distinguish between, so that's a =
possibility I guess. We'll see what comes out of it.

>> And what about diphthongs like 'ae' and 'oe'?
> Oh yes, definitely diphthongs are possibilities.  You'll=20
> have notice the Welsh 'car' /kar/ (with trilled /r/)
> becomes 'ceir' /k@ir/ in the plural.=20
> The final -i of the original *cari seems first to have=20
> palatalized the /r/ so that you a sort of /rj/ sound=20
> which would tend to have a _very_ short /i/ anticipating=20
> it, thus something like [kairj(i)].  Later the final=20
> consonant was depalatalized but the /i/ remained, hence=20
> 'cair'.

Why is the plural 'ceir' then? Shouldn't it be 'cair'? Or perhaps
the spelling has nothing to do with it, (since it's pronounced /c@ir/).

> Yep, if your original - now 'lost' - plural ending was -i,=20
> you could well have forms like, e.g. kan, kain; fos, fois;
> mus, muis etc.  Tolkien uses this as well as simple=20
> fronting in Sindarin (and IIRC some of his other langs),
> cf. Adan, Edain.
I know. This is where my idea originally came from. :) Althought I don't =
want to copy his system, for obvious reasons...

> If your original plural was -u, then this might have given=20
> rise to diphthongs in -u rather than unrounded back vowels=20
> (or you might have both!), e.g.  kan, kaun; mer, meur=20
> /mewr/ _or_ meor etc.

Like: /karu/ -> /karw/ -> /kawrw/ -> /kawr/? That's pretty cool! In =
fact, it's a great idea! Mmm... /kawr/... that tastes nice! :)

So as you suggest, I might combine this with a sort of vowel harmony and =
still get the historical part right, right? If root words have a back =
vowel, the plural suffix is -u. And if it's a front vowel, the plural =
suffix would be -i.
Examples:=20
          kar - karu  -->  kar - kawr
          ker - keri  -->  ker - keir
          kir - kiri  -->  kir - kiir (long vowel)


> Well, I hope I've given you a few clues  :)

Well...some... :D

Just one more question to see if I got the umlauts right.
A-umlaut lowers (i -> e, u -> o)
U-umlaut rounds (i -> y, e -> =F8)
I-umlaut? Was that the car -> ceir example?

And now a comment on Steg's reply, namely the thing in Hebrew where the =
vowel becomes a schwa if it is too far from the stress. It reminded me =
of a thing I thought about when we discussed the schwa in class the =
other day. I'm beginning to like that sound.
I combined the Hebrew thing and my own idea. I have an idea about =
turning /e/ into its central equivalent (half-close, unrounded, central) =
it looks like a reversed /e/.
And turning /u/ into the Swedish 'u' (looks like /u/ but with a =
horizontal bar across it. I write it /u-/ in the following example). The =
same thing with /i/ and /o/.

Examples: (-im/-om plural suffixes because of vowel harmony)

          /kerem/ (sg)  -->  /k@rem'im/ (pl)
          /kurum/ (sg)  -->  /ku-rum'om/ (pl)

Well, this clearly needs some consideration. I know what I will be doing =
this upcoming weekend. :)

Thanks again!

/ Daniel Andreasson