Re: Affixes and other things... (Was: Basque Article)

Irina Rempt-Drijfhout <ira@...> wrote:
>
> I've been worried that Valdyan was becoming too regular, because when
> a new word comes up it brings a bunch of other words made with the
> usual affixes  (_for_ "worship" is the worst, it has a field of
> thirteen words) but a quick look at the dictionary reassures me: it's
> only globally regular, sometimes a derivation means something
> completely different from what one would expect. For instance: _dyst_
> "drapery", _dysta_ "to cover with a drapery", _le dysta_ "to hide"
> <fx: image of child under bedclothes>, _dysten_ "wall-hanging"
> (obviously to hide ugly masonry). Just like a real language ;-)
What is <fx:>?
These derivations are really clever, I must say! I try to do things
like that sometimes but they don't come out spontaneously.
What I do when things become too regular is to mess with the ancient
language so that adding a suffix umlauts or syncopes a vowel, or changes
a consonant in some locally regular but globally unpredictable way.

--Pablo Flores