Re: English "another"/Conlang Question

Den 9. aug. 2007 kl. 01.23 skrev David J. Peterson:

> Indeed, that's what I had reasoned.  But how
> long has it been since we've had this separate
> word "another"?  Can you envision a time in
> the future where we'll be able to say "an another
> cookie"?
Start using it yourself and see if it will spread. When I was a kid I
did quite a few such experiments, some of them kind of successful.

Concerning the topic linguistic innovations, I came to think of an
interesting one in Norwegian today. The local dialect of my home town
is one of those that has a distinction between e- and a-verbs, which
is the case with the majority of Norwegian dialects, I think. There
is a common Norwegian word for 'making a loud noise': smelle /smele/,
which is an e-verb. But we have also an a-verb version meaning 'make
an extra loud noise': smala /sma:l`a/ - and I have sometimes heard /
Sma:l`a/ for extra emphasis. Both words have toneme 2, which I don't
know if there's a symbol for in Sampa.

I think there are two ways in which this distinction can have arisen.
Either smala was innovated when in need to describe the making of an
extra loud noise after the pattern of existing a-verbs. Or smelle is
a loan from Danish and smala is a local word which when retained
gives the language an extra nuance. This latter mechanism is not
unique; for example we have both the Danish 'fet' and the Norwegian
'feit', both meaning 'fat', but with different nuances.

It shows that there are many ways to innovate words and many ways for
conlangers to make new constructions...

LEF