Re: THEORY: Progressive voicing assimilation

On 9/14/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <melroch@...> wrote:
> Does anyone know of any natlang which has general progressive voicing
> assimilation, i.e. so that both voicedness and voicelessness spreads
> forwards in a consonant cluster? I know of languages which have both
> progressive and regressive devoicing assimilation -- I am in fact a
> native speaker of one -- so that's not the issue here, only if any
> language has the reverse of what Russian has.
I've heard that Maltese has general _re_gressive voicing assimilation
(e.g. kiteb [kitep] "he wrote", kitbu [kidbu] "they wrote", jiktbu
[jigdbu] "they write"; hobż [hops] "bread" for the opposite effect -
[z] turns into [s] word-finally and then the [b] assimilates to [p]
because of that).

Though that's probably not what you're looking for.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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