Re: CHAT: Dwarfs/dwarves (was Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin)

Anton Sherwood wrote:
> "Y.Penzev" wrote:
> > And surely NO GVS !!! I HATE the Great Vowel Shift !!!
>
> I'm not wild about it myself.
I'm kind of like it, just because it makes for some nice complexities in
our vowels.  :-)  I like to find some way of incorporating a kind of
vowel shift when I develop historical developments of languages.
Uatakassi's vowel system is too simple for that (altho its descendants
may bear some kind of vowel shifts), but it does still have traces of
the obsolete schwa.  Schwa was lost whenever it would not create an
unacceptable consonant cluster, where it was kept, it shifted to /a/.
In the ancestral language, the schwa was replaced by -i in the plural,
other vowels simply had -i added to them.  So, in the modern language,
nouns and adjectives ending in -a usually form their plural as -ai, but
in a few cases form them in -i.  For example, the adjective _amba_
"clever" becomes _ambi_, while _lalasta_ (bird) becomes _laflassi_,
la-/laf- being gender prefixes, and a productive _sti_ -> _ssi_ sound
change turns *laflasti into laflassi

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