Re: Tiki vocabulary

From: "Jim Henry" <jimhenry1973@...>
Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2006 6:20 PM

> On 4/9/06, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:
<snip>
>> I wonder,
>> though, how agglutinating/fusional languages deal with
>> potentially ambiguous compounds of affixes and stems.
>
> Natural ones, or engelang/auxlang type conlangs?
Natural ones, e.g. Finnish, Turkish, ...

> In Greek a fair number of verb roots start with epsilon
> (/E/), which for other verbs is a prefix indicating tense and
> aspect (exactly which tense and aspect depends on the verb
> endings applied).  Those verbs lengthen the initial
> epsilon to eta (/e:/) to mark those tense/aspects.  I'm
> not sure if there are any verbs with a stem starting with
> eta but I suspect so.
Same here, basically. A verb like _mapa-_ (point at) would
be _mamapa-_ in past tense etc., so *there* at least is no
big problem. There may also be dialects that fuse these
endings and have _mápa-_ instead.

Carsten

--
"Miranayam kepauarà naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Venena, Yangtim 9, 2315, ea 10:33:21 pd