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Re: Lenition or Elision or What?

From:R A Brown <ray@...>
Date:Monday, December 12, 2005, 17:08
caeruleancentaur wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, caeruleancentaur > <caeruleancentaur@Y...> wrote: > > >>There is a phonetic phenomenon in Senjecan that occurs when the >>personal pronoun nominative + the present tense marker are prefixed >>to a verbnoun with an initial vowel. > > >>m-i-ât-a /mi'at_da/ >>1sg.-pres.-go-indic. >>I go. > > >>This becomes mïâta. m_j'at_da > > > Something similar, if not identical, happens in Swahili.
I regret to say, I find no evidence to support that.
> In the > KITU class of nouns, ki- is prefixed to the root for the singular > and vi- for the plural, e.g., kikapu, basket; vikapu, baskets. > However, sometimes before a vowel these prefixes are altered to "ch" > and "vy" respectively. Thus ki-umba, room, becomes chumba, and vi- > umba, rooms, becomes vyumba. My text doesn't give a name for this > phenomenon. I would imagine that the spelling "vyumba" indicates a > palatal consonant.
I don't know why. I know of no evidence that |vy| indicates [v_j]; I have always understood that |vy| meant exactly what it indicated, namely [vj]. After all, this is a common enough treatment of |i| before vowels in the Romance languages (and many others) - the difference is that they don't show the change in writing - cf. French _bien_ [bjE~] Italian _piano_ ['pjano] Spanish _siete_ ['sjete] As for _chumba_, this is surely nothing other than the very common sound change of [kj] to [c] or a affricate such as [tç], [tS]. Such changes happened in Proto-Greek, in Vulgar Latin (as reflected still in Italian and church Latin pronunciation of |c|), in the modern Scandinavian languages and in many other parts of the world.
> > I do not know why this doesn't occur in all such situations. E.g. > kiatu, shoe, and viatu, shoes!
Or _kiazi_ 'potato' ~ _viatu_ potatoes. A natlang has to have exceptions :-) I suspect it depends at what at what stage these words entered the language, from what dialect etc.
> > Charlie > http://wiki.frath.net/user:caeruleancentaur > -- > This email has been verified as Virus free > Virus Protection and more available at http://www.plus.net >
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Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>