Re: Lenition or Elision or What?
| From: | R A Brown <ray@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Monday, December 12, 2005, 17:08 |
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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.
--
Ray
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