Re: THEORY: morphological processes

On 19 Jan 00, at 16:34, dirk elzinga wrote:

> Hey.
>
> 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.
[cut+pasted out of sequence]
> 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? I'm
> primarily interested in processes which alter the shape of the
> stem (3-6), but I welcome discussion of any kind of process
> which is not simply affixation of fixed material. Here are some
> questions you might use to guide your responses:
[end edit]

> These processes include:
>
> 1.      vowel ablaut
Meynian uses what appears to be irregular ablaut to form plurals of nouns.
e.g.
An Maenán /An m&nA:n/ (the man)
An Meinán /An meInA:n (the men)

This is also extended to verbal nouns, which are derived from verbs by
simple suffixation.

Ablaut is also going to be involved in comparitives and superlatives in a
similar way, but I haven't yet worked much on them.

> 2.      consonant mutation
Thagojian is going to base almost the entire grammar on pre-, in- and
suffixes that have been absorbed into consonontal mutations within roots.
There are no examples yet, as I haven't started work on it very much yet.

> 3.      root and pattern/templatic morphology
Erm, by this, do you mean in the hebrew/arabic/maltese kinda mold?
If so, then Wenetaic regularly distinguishes nouns from verbs -- and also
the single/plural and perfect/imperfect distinctions -- by shuffling around
the vowels and consonants in the root.
e.g.
Noun Singluar: takir (a touch)
Noun Plural: tatkir ((several) touches)
Verb Perfect: taktir (he touches)
Verb Imperfect: takatir (he is touching)

Noun Singluar: morur (a corpse)
Noun Plural: motrur (corpses)
Verb Perfect: mortur (he kills)
Verb Imperfect: morotur (he is killing)

> 4.      reduplications of various kinds
The earlier stages of Wenetaic used partial reduplications, which evolved
into the above system.

> 5.      truncation
> 6.      other kinds of stem manipulations such as lengthening,
>         shortening, and deletion of vowels or consonants
I don't know of these features in any langs I have started work on, tho
some or more of 6 is likely to turn up in Thagojian.