Re: Thalassan Possessive Suffixes

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:00:53 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>This is a pielang, isn't it?
Not quite.  It's designed as a "cousin" language to PIE itself (and also
Uralic, among others) via the Nostratic hypothesis.

>Anyway, I like the suffixes.
Thanks! :)

>I do wonder, tho, whether the sound-changes in the pl forms are regular -
>the loss of the second-to-last vowel seems a tad odd.
You could be right.  I wanted all of the endings to be monosyllabic, since
most words in Thalassan are at least disyllabic.  Also, I assume a shift in
prosody during the (pre)history of the language, from stress-timed to
syllable-timed.  Early on, the /i/ of *-mitas and *-thitas became devoiced,
presumably due to stress-timed prosody and the enclisis itself.  It was
easy to simply elide the vowel entirely, then.

- Rob