Re: Circumfixes and syllabic consonants

At 10:18 31/10/98 -0200, you wrote:
>Hi all!
>
>I'd like to hear your opinions about the use of circumfixes.
>I'm planning to have quite a lot of them in a new conlang
>project, but it seems to me they are more the exception than
>the rule in natlangs. Anybody has stats about which natlangs
>use each kind of affix? (I mean, suffixes, prefixes, infixes,
>and circumfixes). Are circumfixes just a merge of prefix + suffix
>or something else?
>
I've read of a natlang that uses circumfixes in a very odd way: in a noun
phrase, the first part of the circumfix is placed exactly in front of the
noun completed, but the last part is placed at the opposite end, as far from
the noun as possible. I explain: a noun phrase like "in the father's house"
would be like this:

of-1st part father in-1st part house in-last part of-last part.

Imagine the difficulty of a more complex noun phrase!

>Also, syllabic consonants: how frequent are they? Have you
>ever used them? By "syllabic consonants" I mean consonant
>sounds that can be treated as vowels, i. e. they can form a
>syllable, and be stressed. I know at least Chinese has a syllabic
>"r". My new conlang is having lots of syllabic consonants; in
>fact, voiced fricatives can all be syllabic.
>
Sanskrit had syllabic r, l, m and n. In fact, it considered i, u, r, l, m
and n as semi-vowels.

>
>--Pablo Flores
>
>* If a princess kisses a frog and the frog doesn't become a prince,
>* let's not hurry into discarding the frog. Enchanted princes are
>* rare, but authentic princesses are not abundant either.
>*
>*     (Ana Marma Shza, "House of Geishas")
>
>
                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"R=E9sister ou servir"

homepage: http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html