I have a bit of an interesting observation! Recently I have been reading about the Frisian languages and have been fascinated by it!! One interesting thing are the strong/irregular verb endings! Particularly how they take on different endings! The weak conjugations are pretty straight forward, no big surprises with it- but the irregular verbs get real interesting!
Firstly, when the stem ends in a voiceless fricative, it becomes voiced in the plural (<ch> [x] > <g> [ɣ], <s> [s] > <z> [z], <f> [f] > <v> [v]):
Ik doch (I do) > Wy dogge (We do)
Ik seach (I saw) > Wy seagen (We saw)
Ik sis (I say) > Wy sizze (We say)
When the present stem ends in a vowel, the plural ending begins with <w> [w]:
Ik ha (I have) > Wy hawwe (We have)
Ik jou (I give) > Wy jouwe (We give)
When the past stem ends in a vowel, the plural ending begins with <n> [n]:
Ik die (I did) > Wy dienen (We did)
Ik wie (I was) > Wy wienen (We were)
Ik sei (I said) > Wy seinen (We said)
BUT this isn’t the case for the past tense of gean “to go”:
Ik gie (I went) > Wy gongen (We went)
Or in IPA:
/ɪk ɣiə/ > /vɛi ɣo:ŋən/
Of the irregular verbs I have seen so far, this is the only one that features a vowel shift from singular to plural, and has a velar nasal rather than the dental nasal! But then again, of the irregular verbs I have looked at so far whose past stem ends in vowel, gean is the only one that begins with a velar, so this might be a case of lag assimilation? I will have to dig through more verbs to confirm this, and look for cases of assimilation with bilabial initial consonants causing /n/ > /m/! Anyway, I imagine that because of this new velar nasal, the tongue then becomes more raised in the back, which results /iə/ > /o:/ in anticipation for /ŋ/!- that makes sense but I could be a lil wrong XD
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