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Re: Norreyna again (long-ish)

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Thursday, March 22, 2001, 20:24
Aidan Grey wrote:
> In any conlang that develops from roots, how do you >get from a bare root to a specific root? Maybe an >example would explain better: > > If I have the root SIW, which indicates the idea of >following, how do you derive the noun meaning >'travois'? I want to avoid Tolkien's method (using the >same suffixes over and over so that all the nouns end >in -wa, for example). How about verbs? Adjectives?
We-ell, Tolkien was a bit more innovative than that. In his langs, there's plenty of endings for deriving nouns for examples, and some endings have several meanings. The word _lanta_ is the verb "to fall" and the noun "fall", but from the form it looks quite like an adjective ... :-) In my conlang, many basic words consist of the bare unmarked stem. So if there was a root SIV ("w" can't occure in roots in this language family) meaning "follow" there mightn very well be a verb _siv_ "follow". There could also be noun "following" that could be _sivze_, _sfist_ (really evil derivational rules at work!) or _sivent_ (verbal noun form that in principle can be formed from any verb).
> > I'm also trying to figure out how to do plurals - >some are in -a, some are via umlaut. Just a >strong/weak distinction in the protolanguage? I really >like, and want to be able to do, tracing various forms >back to the proto-language, i.e. I want to be able to >show how the dative case arose from the noun-root and >this other root "xyz".
We-ell, what kind of umlauts are you thinking of? If you're using I-umlauts or U-umlauts, you could simple say that some nouns in the primitive language took _-a_ in plural and some _-i_/_-u_, and then introduce rules for phonological change that keeps _-a_ but causes _-i_/_-u_ to first cause umlaut and then disappear. Voila! Andreas _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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Aidan Grey <frterminus@...>