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Re: Feminization of plurals?

From:Alex Fink <000024@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 11, 2009, 16:56
On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:05:20 +0100, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
<tsela.cg@...> wrote:

>Interesting phenomenon. Is anything like that also happening in class >systems like the Bantu system? (Swahili and related languages) I.e. have we >got evidence of reanalysis of classes and conflating due to similar or >identical surface forms?
But of course. In Swahili, for instance, the ancestral Bantu classes 11 (/lu-/, long thin things) and 14 (/bu-/, abstracts) have fallen together in a single /u-/ class with the regular loss of the initial /l/ and /b/. Further discussion of the consequences this had for the resulting class at http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/swahili/sect4-4.html , part of Ellen Contini-Morava's analysis of the semantic structures in the Swahili noun classes which, for those who haven't encountered it, is a great read for fuel for the conlanging fire. Alex

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Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <tsela.cg@...>