Re: average syllables per word?

Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...> wrote:
> >
> >Cool! I never thought of non-syllabic roots!
> >
>
>         I have some in my Azak, as roots morphology obliges roots to have at least
> a final consonnant, but nothing before is mandatory (Azak is heavily
> agglutinating with only suffixes and words used without at least one suffix
> are very rare (mostly interjections)). The most important consonnantal root
> is 'n'. It is used to transform some suffixes into nouns or verbs (like
> person suffixes into pronouns) and is widely used.
Could you give an example? It's a very interesting thing
to transform affixes into roots!

Georgian has a lot of roots that consist only of consonants.
For example: -rch- 'remain', -tkhr- 'tell', -vl- 'come',
-d- 'come' (another one), -tsv- 'wear', -khvd- 'meet', etc.
These I found in an online grammar, just by looking at
conjugated verbs. Georgian (like your Azak) is heavily
agglutinating too (24 possible affix slots per verb root!),
so there tend to be vowels around those roots, but not always.

(Speaking of consonant clusters... my favorite Georgian word
is _vprtskvni_ 'I am peeling it', which is supposed to be
one syllable. I don't know which part is 'peel', but I'm quite
sure it's not the vowel.)


--Pablo Flores