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

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 12, 2001, 13:10
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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Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>Consonant clusters (was Citation forms of words, and the cynicism required to study Georgian)