Re: Nouns from Verbs

Rob Haden wrote:

>So, what made you come up with the deverbal suffixes that you use?  Any
>internal history behind them?
   The reason why there are a bunch of suffixes for the same purpose is
that I came up with one pair (most verb endings come in pairs: one for -ak
and one for -ek), made a few nouns, forgot about it, and then later came up
with another pair and resumed making nouns. Upon rediscovering the old set,
I just decided to leave them in and have both pairs available. A third set
for each came just for the hell of it, as did the class-crossing -uk.
   The internal history's excuse has to do with Rhean being, even in its
own world, something of a "conlang". A few natural languages have
a "standard" dialect created by edict from existing dialects.
The "standard" Rhean regularised a lot of grammar and did away with a lot
of duplicate suffixes. It also heavily favoured the Mavrius dialect. But
where some bit of irregularity was in too frequent use to change, it was
left alone. It was unlikely that people would start calling a |doro| a
*|dorud| for example. So I could say that the forms either represent
dialect variations of the same original suffix (by sound change) which were
reborrowed into the "standard" language, OR that the different suffixes
originally gave different senses of verbal noun but later collapsed into
one meaning with several forms.

M