Re: THEORY: Evolution of infixes/ablaut?

Eric Christopherson wrote:
> I'm really fascinated by the idea but I
> can't figure out how the mind would allow a morpheme to be modified from
> the inside -- just seems like morphemes "should" be concrete, unbreakable
> elements to me. It's a bias in my conlanging instinct I guess :)
I'm not sure either, perhaps it's just spontaneous or something.  After
all, colloquial vulgar English uses infixes quite frequently, as in
abso-f***ing-lutely, or a line I read somewhere "Down in
Tumba-bloody-rumba shooting kanga-bloody-roos"

Perhaps sometimes it's simple metathesis.  Suppose that the plural infix
was -l-, placed before the final consonant.  Well, it could've been that
at an earlier stage it was a suffix -l, and forms like, say, _pakl_
became _palk_.  That's just a guess, tho, and couldn't explain all
infixes, either.

Another guess is that perhaps it started with only some words.  For
instance, Tagalog had an infix -um- placed after the first consonant.  I
can't remember what the meaning is, tho.  Anyhoo, maybe (and this is
only a guess) it started with only some words, wherein the first
consonant was a now-unproductive prefix, so that the -um- was, in fact,
merely a closer prefix.  Perhaps the old prefix was reanalyzed as part
of the root, and then -um- was generalized to all words, regardless of
whether they historically began with a prefix.

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