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

On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, FFlores wrote:

> What is <fx:>?
A visual effect like in a movie.

> These derivations are really clever, I must say! I try to do things
> like that sometimes but they don't come out spontaneously.
With me, they don't come when I try. The Esperanto effect takes over
then, I set myself to thinking what it *should* mean, losing track of
what it *does* mean. The really surprising derivations only happen
when I don't try, for instance when I derive something from a
half-remembered stem without bothering to look it up.

> 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.
I can't do that, because I know very little about earlier stages of
the language, and also because it would mean that I'd have to make a
lot of changes to the status quo that would make a lot of earlier
texts invalid, and that's a side effect I don't want at all.

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)