Re: Can't stop agglunating, HELP!

>I know the advice is probably going to be "relax and go with the
>flow", but I really didn't want my artlang (Wenetaic) doing what it's
>started to do.  It's supposed to be believably Indo-European, and if
>possible relatively old.  All help to get me back on track would be
>appreciated.
>
>The problem is:
>
>I can't stop adding (fairly regular and "almost" free-order)
>agglunative suffixes to the grammar.  Almost every grammatic
>feature I want or need to add can be expressed in in this way
[snip]

I know you've already solved your own problem, but I just thought I'd
mention vowel gradation, a popular feature of Proto-Indo-European which
has survived in places in many of the daughter languages - e.g. English
"sing-sang-sung", PIE "*gen-, *gon-, *gn-, etc..  If you want to
decrease the number of suffixes in Wenetaic without impoverishing the
inflectional system, you could do some of your inflecting by changing
the vowels of the roots.

Also: The proper term is "agglutinative".  John Cowan's "agulunulative"
was an inside joke...  (I only mention it since you seem to have
taken John's correction seriously!)

Matt.


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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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