Re: a question concerning voicing harmony and vowels

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

>To begin, I feel rather silly at times doing this, as every time I mail
the list it's to ask it a question, as I hardly ever have anything to add
to the conversations going on.
>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.

Well, I don't have the universal-language-database in my head
(unfortunately :p), nor do I have any langs in mind with the particular
features you describe; "particular" I say I don't have, but I can offer
you "roughly".

That is to say, voice assimilation (or harmony, on a bigger scale) is
something perfectly normal - call it "universal". Vowel quality
assimilation is also very usual, and phonemic nasalization "transfer"
is "run-of-the-mill" too. Overall, I can't see anything unnatural in what
you mention of your conlang scheme. So, by all means go on with it :)

Óskar

PS I know that "nameless dread" you describe; the most efficient way to get
a good feel for what is realistic and what not (and thus tackle the dread)
is to study and understand the articulatory aspect of phonetics, i.e. how
the various sounds are pronounced. If we could download a reference library
of the world's languages into our heads, that might be better, but... we
can't :p Anyway, with a firm grasp of articulatory phonetics you can think
of sound changes that make perfect sense though you may not have seen them
in any particular language in your own experience (which is limited, after
all, for any human being).

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