Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

On Sun, 4 Jul 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> I may be mistaken, but aren't there also some morphophonemic
> alternations involved with Romanian's articles?  (Altho I guess the same
> could be said of French, with le/l')?
As far as I can remember my sketchy Romanian (the book is behind my
mother's legacy, we've bought a larger house but can't move in yet)
only in the masculine plural... let's see...

                    article  noun (root form)     indet.       det.

masculine singular     -lu   copilu (child)       copil (1)   copilul
masculine plural       -li   copili (children)    copii (2)   copiii (3)

(1) Any Romanian who is not a linguist, and even some Romanians who
are linguists, will tell you that there's no -u in _copil_ and that
the article is -ul, but I have this on good authority (from
Jean-Pierre Kent, my teacher in Amsterdam). Any final -u is
automatically dropped and most people don't realize that it used to
be there.

(2) The -l- is elided; it's pronounced [ko'pi]

(3) Pronounced [ko'piji] ; the underlying form is *copilili.

                    article  noun (root form)     indet.       det.

feminine singular     -a     fat# (girl)          fat#         fata
feminine plural       -le    fete (girls)         fete         fetele

where # stands for the a with the little bow on top that's pronounced
slightly less flat than a shwa.

Neuter words in Romanian have masculine forms in the singular, and
feminine forms in the plural.

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)