Re: Some Random Questions

dunn patrick w wrote:
> 2.  How do you handle irregularity?  I know this has popped up before, but
> I'm still not sure.  For instance, do you always make the verbs of being
> irregular?  The personal pronouns?  Or do you just let irregularities
> evolve?
Well, sometimes you just MAKE them irregular.

>
> 3.  How unnatural is it to have only one class of noun declensions?
> (Well, now that I think of it, I guess English only has one real class of
> noun declensions -- of regular nouns, anyway)  Or only one of verb
> declensions?
Quite natural.  Quite a few languages have only one class of noun
declensions, especially agglutinative languages.  Turkish, for example,
has the plural ending -lar/-ler (which vowel is used is predictable
based on the vowels in the stem) and various case-endings like -in
(ablative, I think), which are combined thus: evlerin.  The endings are
the same for all nouns.  PIE is believed to have had only one set of
endings, but they interacted with the stem vowel (so that Latin 1st
declension comes from nouns whose stem ended in -a, 2nd from -o, 3rd
from -i or consonant, fourth from -e, fifth from -u), and various other
phenomena happened to complicate it.

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-name: NikTailor