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.
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