Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Charles wrote:

> (my favorite example, English "the" falsely implies "only one")
I started on an agglutinative language once that had five kinds of
"article" markers. From broad to narrow:

indefinite plural   "women", "some women"
definite plural     "the women", "those women"
indefinite singular "a woman" "one woman or another", "any woman"
definite singular   "the woman", "that woman", "the woman we've been
                    talking about"
unique singular     "She" (title of the High Priestess of the very
                    small country where the language was spoken)

It was part of a joint conculture project and when that stopped I had
a lot of other things to do (like having babies :-) so all there is
of it is a one-page morpheme list, some phrases and the only thing I
ever wrote in it, a declaration of war.

Worse still, I can't find it.

I remember that there was one word roughly meaning "Verimak!" that
consisted only of affixes: a tense marker, an aspect marker and two
negations (or one circumfixed negation). No root whatsoever, because
that should have been the copula and the language was zero-copula.

Now there's something "neat" I did that I'd like to find and play
with some more :-)

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastinay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)