Re: How big

Irina Rempt wrote:
> I can fiddle with the *description*, and that will spawn some structural
> changes, but they never apply to things already there; they stay as
> obsolete or exceptions.
I'm in the middle.  The changes I've made recently, I've decided are
actually recent changes as far as the history of the language goes.  For
example, I made the stress fixed, and introduced a 2-syllable minimum
word-length (this minimum ignores gender-prefixes; they seem to be best
halfway between clitics and prefixes, actually).  This made some older
words, like _uatiai_ "faith" illegal.  I solved that by creating the
word _uatiaila_, based on the abstract suffix -la and the related *verb*
_tiai_ (have faith), suffixes count toward the minimum and, since,
outside of the imperative, suffixes always occur on verbs (well, almost
always, -u is lost on certain verbs), they generally remained
unaffected.  The imperative of _tiai_ bears a partial reduplicant tatiai
to lengthen it to 2 syllables.

*However*, uatiai does still exist as a somewhat-archaic way of saying
"faith", with the partially reduplicated form uatatiai used in forms
without syllabic suffixes.  _tiai_ also still exists as a name-element.

Another example, _A-klus_ "foot" is almost obsolete, generally replaced
by _uabaska_ "leg".  Again, when used, it must become _A-kuklus_ in the
absolutive to fulfil the 2-syllable minimum.  _A-_ is my convention to
show that "foot" falls in the category of body parts whose gender is
determined by their possessor.  Hence, a woman's foot is tikuklus, a
man's foot nakuklus, a person's foot in general is sukuklus, a domestic
animal's kikuklus, a wild animal's lakuklus.  Presumably, _klus_ could
remain as a name-element.

A lot of my earlier changes were based on exploring the ancestral
language, and on playing with the sound changes that lead to the
Classical tongue.

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