Re: Group Conlang: affix morphology

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>Am I the only person who wants to vote for B?  It's more naturalistic.
>Very few (if any) languages have case-prefixes.  In fact, the very few
>cases of case-prefixes are actually inflected demonstratives that were
>fused to the noun, and therefore also incorporate gender.
>
What if gender developed later in our language?
I'm used to have case suffixes, but that's probably because of my
Latin background. I'm OK with any position, but I've grown accustomed
to use prefixes now!

>Well, we could also have CV- --> C-, but that would limit the number of
>prefixes possible.  How about adding nothing.  What's wrong with pe- +
>ak- --> peak-?  If you definitely don't want VV sequences, add a glottal
>stop, thus pe?ak- OR have prefixes in the form CV(C)-, where the (C)
>indicates a consonant which is only used before vowels, thus, perhaps
>pe(t)- + ak- --> petak-, but pe(t)- + pop --> pepop.
We have not included glottal stop in the phonology... I don't like
it and I daresay I'm not the only one.

There's nothing wrong with peak-, because the syllable division
is preserved (-ea- doesn't look like a diphthong). But pi- + ak-
= pjak-? (See my other post).

The idea of CV(C)- prefixes is fine, though I still think
a regular change *ut-C > us-C in this case would be better. Can't
we have both please? <:-(



>> >The same goes for postposed affixes, except that -CV(C) should
>> >not be allowed (we don't want to change the root, right?).
>
>Well, why would you need to change the root?  If the root had a
>permissible syllable-structure, it wouldn't matter what the affix was.
I meant: what if you use a -CV(C) prefix and add it to a root like
kjak-? kjak- + -tu = *kjaktu is not valid; if you used the regular
change stop > fricative, you would need kjakhtu, thus changing the
root. To avoid this we could insert an epenthetic vowel, perhaps
the same as the root vowel: kjakatu.

>Suffixes, they're called.  If we were to add unstressed vowels, perhaps
>we should have a single vowel to always add, perhaps schwa, or maybe
>/a/, thus
>
>> qiv+s => qifys
>
>For this, _qivas_ or _qivza_/_qifsa_
_qivas_ or _qivis_ (see above for this one)

>
>> tru+o => truwo
>
>Going back to my earlier comments on prefixes, tru?o.
>
I'd prefer _truwo_. Or just truo /'tru.o/. What's the problem
with non-diphthong vowels?


--Pablo Flores