Re: THEORY: Evolution of infixes/ablaut?

>On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>
> >Hi. I'm wondering if anyone has any information or even ideas about how
> >languages develop alternation inside of morphemes? That is to say, where
> >morphemes can be inflected or otherwise modified by changing, adding, or
> >deleting elements _inside_ the morphemes themselves, such as with infixes
> >and ablaut (vowel alternation). 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 :)
> >The point of this is that I'd like to use infixes and/or vowel
>alternation
> >in a conlang, but I'd like to be able to demonstrate that they evolved
> >(intra-conlang) somehow from an earlier form without internal
>alternation.
>
>>Certain ones, like umlaut changes in English, could be demonstrated
>through successive stages of the language:
>         maniz > mani > meni > men; where i raises a
In swedish plural of 'man' (=man) is 'män' (the middle letter is supposed to
be an 'a' with dots; perhaps it shows up strange on your computer). I think
that inflection is derived from the regular plyural 'man'/'manner' whick
then became
'männer' when the suffix vowel fronted the a in the stem by assimiliation or
whatever. finally the original plural ending was dropped. So in this case
the morpheme was changed by an ending that used to be there.
It would not surprise me if that happened in other languages as well

/Jens

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