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Re: a question concerning voicing harmony and vowels

From:Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 11, 2001, 6:40
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