Re: Radical-Metathesis

On Feb 6, 2008 10:13 AM, Mr Veoler <veoler@...> wrote:

> To feed the list a little... My sketch 8.1.5 uses radical-metathesis,
> that is, the root have the shape CCC, and the order of the consonants
> indicate
> a morphological category.
>
> For example:
>
> rbl > rlb > railabi "know"
> rbl > brl > bairali "learn"
>
> Does it exist any natlang that exhibit this feature?
> If it does, are there any restrictions?
> If not, do you judge it to be unlearnable*?
>
> *as a productive pattern for a native speaker

It exists as a language game in varieties of Arabic, but to the best of my
knowledge, it is not found as an active, productive process in the regular
morphology/phonology of any language. It seems to me that certain
permutations of consonants would be excluded since they would be potentially
ambiguous. So if the three consonant set {r,b,l} means 'know' (and
derivationally related notions), then that set would be excluded from any
other meaning. So from six possible roots in a traditional system (rbl, rlb,
brl, blr, lrb, lbr), you only get one {r,l,b} in your radical metathesis
system. It doesn't seem to be "unlearnable", but I could imagine certain
permutations becoming lexicalized to go their own way and acquire shades of
meaning not predictable from the system. At that point, the productivity of
radical metathesis would be lost.

But try it out and see what happens. One question I have is how do you know
which permutation you started from, and what do the permutations mean?

Dirk
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