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Re: Longest words

From:J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
Date:Friday, May 4, 2001, 1:35
Tokana has various suffixes (and a couple prefixes) which can be attached to verb
stems to indicate things like person/number/animacy of subject or object, tense,
aspect, mood, comparison, negation, and clause type.  It's rare to get more than
about three suffixes on a single root, but I bet I could construct a form which
uses one of each type.

Let's see, the longest verb stem I can think of is "emuktinalim-", which means "to
be backwards, to do things backwards" (lit. "finish before beginning"):

  an-emuktinalim-if-
  "be as backwards as X"

  an-emuktinalim-if-alk-
  "continue to be as backwards as X"

  an-emuktinalim-if-alk-uh-
  "want to continue to be as backwards as X"

  an-emuktinalim-if-alk-uh-ot-
  "not want to continue to be as backwards as X"

  an-emuktinalim-if-alk-uh-ot-umo-mna
  "... that we [exclusive] would not have liked to continue to be as backwards as
X"

That's about as long as they come in Tokana...

Matt.

Replies

J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
daniel andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...>