Re: a question concerning voicing harmony and vowels

On Sun, 8 Apr 2001 19:03:15 -0400, Shreyas Sampat <nsampat@...>
wrote:

<...>
>Anyway, I was wondering.. I have a conlang in which there's voicing harmony
with adjacent consonants, that propagates to the left, so a series of
affixes like -s-v-ak collapses to -zvak.
>On the other hand, there's also vowel assimilation that moves to the
*right*.  So, ni+u~n becomes ni~n, with the nasalization carrying over to
the i.
>Is there a precedent for this?  There's this feeling of nameless dread I
have that tells me this is *not* the way things are ordinarily done.

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.


Basilius

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