Re: a question concerning voicing harmony and vowels

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:50:29 -0700, jesse stephen bangs
<jaspax@...> wrote:

>Vasiliy Chernov sikayal:
>
>> Why? Assimilations in opposite directions are common even with same group
>> of phonemes. E. g. in Ancient Greek stops, aspiration spreads from left
to
>> right, (un)voicing from right to left.
>
>Are you sure?  All of the Greek assimilations that I know of spread right
>to left.  E.g:
[...]
>I can't think of any that go the other way.
Yes, you're right. Sorry, it was a linguistic hallucination of mine ;)

To provide, still, a relevant example: 'inner' sandhi in Sanskrit.

Voiced aspirates spread their quality left-to-right: *bh + t -> bdh, etc.

Other types of stops get assimilated right-to-left: *b + t -> pt,  etc.

Interestingly, in 'outer' sandhi (a different type of morpheme boundaries)
almost all assimilations are right-to-left (including *bh + t -> pt).

Greek aspirates mostly correspond historically to Sanskrit voiced
aspirates. Recently I read an article discussing possible *traces* of
this phenomenon in Ancient Greek (perfects in k/kh? I don't remember),
and that's why I messed things up :(


Basilius