Re: Norreyna again (long-ish)

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
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