Re: Too long words

Carsten wrote:

<<Ayeri
is agglutinating, perhaps even fusional and somewhat isolating.>>

This is kind of like saying, "My friend is a man, perhaps even a baby boy,
and somewhat female."   Which is it: Agglutinating, fusional, or isolating?

Anyway, here are some ideas on how to get smaller verbs:

(1) Take some of your prefixes and turn them into auxiliary verbs.   This
will give you two or three shorter words to express a given concept as opposed to
one long one.

(2) Make your prefixes shorter.   For example, have a class of prefixes that
come first that are maximally V-, then, have all the rest be CV- or V-, where
the two V's can combine to form a diphthong, which then might form its own
separate verb.

(3) Just get rid of some affixes: You don't have to have one for everything.

(4) Combine affixes.   This will increase the number of total affixes, but
reduce the number of affix slots (which is what you're after).   So, for
example, make a whole bunch of prefixes that mean a tense and a person.   For
example, maybe the present will be /n-/, the aorist /r-/, the near past /d-/, the
near future /y-/, the past /l-/, the remote past /v-/, the remote future /m-/ and
the normal future...uh.../f-/.   Then first person will be /a-/, second will
be /i-/ and third will be /u-/ (number will be unmarked).   Now what cost you
two (and in some cases three or four, I notice) syllables before will now be
shortened to only one.   And hey, if you makes these all obstruents, then you
can have a nasal mutation for them all be the passive, or something.   And, of
course, you can also have a null morpheme mean something (third person present
active, for example).

Those are some basic ideas.   Also, it shouldn't be a problem that you can't
hear the morpheme boundaries.   A speaker should probably not even be
conscious of morpheme boundaries, I think.   Sometimes you can never tell.   After
all, can you hear the boundaries between "first person" and "present"   in the
English verb "am"?   Is the "a" the first person part and "m" the present tense
part?   ;)   That's being flippant, but you get the idea.

-David