Re: Root Structures

Ed Heil wrote:

> There are a few possible root structures for Proto-Indo-European roots
> (variations on C-C or C-C-C with a vowel thrown in somewhere, or one
> of the C's turned into a vowel).  I understand that virtually all
> Semitic roots are triconsonantal.
One theory says all PIE roots were CVC, and that Hamitic-Semitic
(Afro-Asiatic) was too. Altaic, I never heard any crazy theories about,
except the one that says it and PIE and AA all are related. Some people
build con-trees of nat-langs; I say everything is an areal influence.
Future experts will say "the lexemes cocoa and futbol are attested
in Engvaho and Russchese, therefore obviously they were related".

> What do roots look like in languages with overwhelmingly CV syllable
> structure?  CV or CVCV?
Quechua/Aymara. Lots of CVCV roots and CV affixes, it makes sense.

I am so tempted to discover that Tomato is agglutinative, like them.
In fact, if anyone wants to help in this futile effort, please
contact me. I am thinking it should use an accented V1 in its roots,
to make parsing work easily. So, roots would be C1+V1+accent+C2+V2.
The accents might represent morpheme-level tones, or just stress.
Words would be root1+(root2)+suffix1+...+suffix23, and I think I
know where to steal a nice vocab list from.

Polynesian langs are cool too, but differently.
There's also Esperanto/Ido (suffixes mostly VC).