Re: Singular Pluralities

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> writes:

> I have to have some words in Maggel which behave like that (meaning, having a
> plural form identical to a singular word of different meaning, or variations on
> the same theme :))) ). But I suppose there are already conlangs out there which
> do that ;))) . Right?
A quick scan of my Senu yiVokuchi dictionary shows there are no
words like that... so far. I'm sure the funny homonyms will start
to pop up soon, since morphology plays a lot with phonology in SyV
and leads to changes such as these:

    taz-    "do" (verb stem)
    sozu    "did" (v.)
    tez-    "(a thing) done" (noun stem)
    tazra   "an instance of doing" (n.)
    tezri   "the doing" (n.)
    yisezri "of the doing" (genitive)

It's all Umlaut (/i/-over-/a/ Umlaut, one of them with the /i/
being deleted, and one instance of /u/-over-/a/ Umlaut) and
one consonant mutation. The past tense |sozu| could also be
the past tense of |soz|, |toz|, or |saz|, if any of those verbs
existed. Some ambiguity will be avoided because the ancestor
language tended to use consonantic roots (a la Semitic langs),
so at least vowel alternation doesn't produce funny homonyms.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/ego/pdf/ng/index.html
  More deri foyade yisenu o Chu ta Khu, midi yue lirik,
  dokale yin khebi lagabat wo wo sega ran de...
      "All things are words of the language in which Someone
       or Something, day and night, writes the infinite din
       that is the story of the world..."