Re: Korahamla lives!

From: "Amanda Babcock" <langs@...>
> The first sentence in Korahámla (a word which means "the instrument by which
> words are put forth") now exists:
>
>         ikókiw jomelaléjkiro
>
>         "I love my kitty"
>
> Traditional interlinears will not work on Korahámla.  It's a mystery
> how the native speakers are able to manage the language, what with the
> derivational processes being so impenetrable.  The utterance disassembled,
> with the easy part first:
>
>         ków "self"
>           plus -ki- "my"        gives kókiw "myself, I"
>           plus topic marker i-  gives ikókiw
Ah, you have infixes.

I'm almost sure I saw examples of interlinear in _Describing Morphosyntax_ but I
can't find them right now [they may not even be there] but my lang Henaudute has
infixes and I would interlinearize your word thusly:

        i-kó[ki]w
        TOP-self[1GEN]

Or something similar.
The next word would be more like

        jo-m[e[la]l]é[j][ki]ro
        COMM-cat[DIM][love][AGT][1GEN]

> Next, the comment:
>
>         méro "cat"
>           plus diminutive -l-   gives meléro "kitty"
>           plus -ki- "my"        gives melékiro "my kitty"
>           plus -a- "to love"    gives melalékiro "to love my kitty"
>           plus -j- "agent of"   gives melaléjkiro "one who loves my kitty"
>           plus comment marker jo-       gives jomelaléjkiro
Interesting.  What determines where in the word the affixes go? -j- and -ki-
seem to go after the stressed vowel and -l- and -a- before--Is there a
grammatical or phonological rule for this, or is it lexicalized?  What positions
are possible?  (I see before the word, after the word, before the stress, and
after it... any others?)

When is reduplication invoked?  [It looks like a syllable-structure rule is
involved... what're the phonological constraints?]  In the case of
vowel-insertion what determines which vowel to insert?  Does anything in
particular prevent the reduplication from happening, i.e. from having
*<jomaléjkiro>?   Do all non-CV affixes invoke reduplication?

Would it be possible to rearrange these affixes?  i.e., apply the "my" to "agent
of" and come up with "my kitty-lover" ?  If so, how would that work,
systematically speaking?


    *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/

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