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Ptauti and RE: interfix/infix

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Thursday, March 2, 2000, 18:53
>From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> >Subject: Re: CONLANG Digest - 28 Feb 2000 to 29 Feb 2000 (#2000-61) > >Muke Tever wrote: >> Sounds like (what the last linguistics book I read called) an interfix. > >Infix, actually. However, that's a general term. I don't know what >that specific kind of infix would be called.
Well, I went and looked it up right after I posted it (I was suddenly stricken with the idea that it must be a special *kind* of interfix, not just 'interfix'...) Apparently an 'infix' goes _within_ a (morpheme?) and an interfix goes _between_ two of them. The book's example was Greek omicron, and silly things like 'Veg-o-Matic'. (The book is 'Linguistics' by Donna Jo Napoli, I found it in the library...) Anyway, I started another language the other day, along the lines of those 'minimal phonological inventory' ideas... I drew the alphabet first, eight symbols, on Monday I guess it was... This lang, 'Ptauti' has eight phonemes: p e t a k u sh i CCCCVV syllable structure. So far I've got a few words, pronouns, bit of grammar (roughly SVO, and isolating) and discovered that the consonant before a vowel becomes voiced (call that prevoicing, right?) and that initial p before a vowel is pronounced 'm'. (That was honestly there by itself, and is not a transparent ruse to fix the Ptauti rendering of my own name. Stop laughing!) Ptauti is to be spoken by a small people who live indoors (Brownies) and ought to reflect that, somehow, if I can get it to... *Muke! -- http://i.am/muke ICQ: 1936556 AIM: MukeTurtle "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -- C. S. Lewis