Re: THEORY: Number and animacy

On Wed, 08 Nov 2006 23:14:42 -0500, Eric Christopherson
<rakko@...> wrote:

> I wonder if it'd be too much to ask for some examples of nominally
> inflected nominals vs. verbally inflected ones and how they are used?
> This sounds quite interesting.
I'll see what I can drag up. It's going to be a larger effort than simply
copying out a couple of paragraphs, though, so it might take a while. The
basic rule seems to be that the semantic connection is lexically and
contextually determined, rather than "properly" derived. I'm gathering
examples and counter-examples right now.

To keep you busy/interested in the mean while, and to provide some extra
color, here's Erica Reiners "minimum possible" Elamite phoneme set. We
don't know the exact set, because (as with many languages of the time and
period) it borrowed an unsuitable writing system (i.e. cuneiform).

Her romanization, following her layout (though she excludes h from the
main layout):

   p   t   k
     š s č     i u
m     n r
             h
                 a
     y l

Based on the text, this is what I think the CXS values are:

   p   t    k
     S s tS     i u
m     n r\
              x
                  a
     j l

She notes several other suggestions:

|y| may be an allophone of |i|
|h| may be /h/ or even something else
There may be a triplet of voiced stops
There may be a set of geminate stops and/or fricatives
There may be /o/ and /e/ vowels
There may be a /K/ or /tK/ phoneme
"Ci" and "iC" characters in the syllabary may sometimes represent lone "C"
phonemes
There may be significantly more vowels or diphthongs

The most common word forms (for nominals and verbs, collectively "bases")
are:
CVCV
CVCCV
CV
VCV

Word forms other than bases are called "indeclinables" and form the usual
set of glue words, which seem to be most commonly CVC and CVCVC in form.



Paul


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