Citation forms of words, and the cynicism required to study Georgian

Quoting Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>:

> S'mae,
> Ysgrifennodd Thomas R. Wier:
> > > And speaking of Georgian, today was the second round of the Moscow
> > > Linguistic Olympics, and we had a Georgian problem there - it was
> > > hideous! What kind of prefixes are these gv- and m-, and a root
> > > like _akvs_! Ouch!
> >
> > We haven't gotten that far yet, but I believe that "gv-" and "m-"
> > are indirect object agreement markers on the verb. Don't know
> > how they work, though.
>
> They might be, and they might not. In that puzzle, they seemed to
> come out as pronominal prefixes, but that can't imply anything, for
> sure - they might be such markers for all what it's worth :-)
>
> I just meant how un-vocalic Georgian is! My languages (all that
> I've tried) seemed to tend to C(S)V(C) structure, I guess it just
> appeals to my lámatyávë :-)
Yeah, that's certainly an odd feature about Georgian.  My professor
likes to say that given the choice of making a consonant cluster of
two and one of, say, six consonants, the native Georgian speaker will
instinctively choose the latter, because, of course, that's much
easier to pronounce. :P

(Somehow, the more extreme examples in English phonology -- "two
sixths [t_hu: sIksTs]" -- never seem to come up in these discussions.)

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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