Re: THEORY: morphological processes

Dirk wrote:

>Here's something I've been thinking about for a while now. Many
>languages of the world show morphological processes which do not
>involve affixation of fixed material. These processes include:
>
>1.      vowel ablaut
>2.      consonant mutation
>3.      root and pattern/templatic morphology
>4.      reduplications of various kinds
>5.      truncation
>6.      other kinds of stem manipulations such as lengthening,
>        shortening, and deletion of vowels or consonants
>
>I've always been interested in morphological processes like
>these. My question is how many of you have included one or more
>of these morphological processes in your languages?
Tokana used to have partial reduplication, but I recently
deleted it from the language - not because I don't like reduplication,
but because (for reasons which are hard to articulate) it doesn't
seem to suit the character of Tokana.

Morphology in Tokana is generally of the boring old prefixing-'n'-
suffixing type.  There are, however, some traces of an earlier
system of ablaut, which has since vanished from the language.
These traces mostly involve non-productive alternations between
an unrounded stem vowel and /oi/.  Compare:

   kespa           "carry"
   fikoispa        "be busy" (ablauted root "kesp-" plus prefix "fi-")

   iha     "woman"
   moiha           "pre-pubescent girl" (ablauted root "iha" plus
           prefix "mi-", used to derive words related to
           motherhood and child-bearing)

   kame    "maternal clan"
   koima           "originate" [archaic] (ablauted root "kam-")

Matt.