Re: THEORY: Evolution of infixes/ablaut?

In a message dated 3/16/2000 10:55:21 AM Eastern Standard Time,
pbrown@POLARIS.UMUC.EDU writes:

<< I remember being taught that the -n- of stand is an infix
 as well. >>
As well as think-thought, bring-brought et al., similarly in German/Dutch
that I know of-  how about Swedish?  Latin tangere-tactus et al. Greek?
probably.   Sanskrit has a class n-infixing verbs like (IIRC) root /ruc/
'shine' > rinokti '3rd. sg.'  So evidently of IE lineage, tho seemingly a
marginal procedure even at that remove.

Nik Taylor mentioned the Tagolog -um- infix.  This, along with its
counterpart -in-, seems also to be of ancient Austronesian lineage.  In all
the langs. that retain the morphology (PI and Taiwan) um/in are always
infixes, presumably reflecting the original situation.  Within the Indonesian
archipelago, AFAIK only Old Javanese shows productive use of the infixes. (Of
course, it's the only lang. with ancient documentation.)   Otherwise, in most
of the modern langs., they've either been lost, or retained only in
fossilized forms.
For years I've pored over a mini-family of langs. spoken in the islands east
of Timor-- they have very interesting ways of binding together
constituents/phonological phrases. E.g. verbal conjugation:  Leti /mu+laa/
'you go' > mlwaa, compound /pipi/ 'goat' + (borr.) /duma/ '' 'sheep' >
pipdiuma 'sheep'.  One investigator found that at least some of this
metathesis/infixing was due to fast-speech rules.

Try as we might to come up with original features in conlangs, some damn
natlang almost always beats us to the punch!