Ptauti and RE: interfix/infix

>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!

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