Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

From: "Tamas Racsko" <tracsko@...>

> - In Chukch, a few case markers are circumfix, e.g. nominative:
>   kupr@.n 'net', comitative: ga.kopra.ma, associative: ge.kupr@.te.
On a side note, Chukchi has an interesting case of vowel harmony. There are
six vowels in the language, and they are classified as high and low. All the
vowels in the same word have to be the same class, either high and low, so
you have alternations of e~a, u~o, @~a and i~e.

This type vowel harmony is not like that found in Uralic and Altaic
languages; it affects the entire word and not just the affixes. I think some
Niger-Kordofanian languages have similar types of vertical vowel harmony, at
least with the mid-level vowels.

> - In Berber languages, the article is agglutinated to the words as
>   a prefix, therefore gender and plural markers are circumfix (0 =
>   zero morpheme, @ = /@/, kh = /x/, gh = /G/, D = emphatic /d_e/),
>   e.g. Taselhit a.frukh.0 '[the] boy', ta.frukh.t '[the] girl',
>   i.frukh.an '[the] boys', ti.frukh.in '[the] girls';
>   verbal personal suffixes can be suffixes, prefixes or
>   circumfixes, e.g. Kabil verb @gm@r 'to gather':
>   1sg g@mr@.gh, 2sg t.g@mr@.D, 3sg (masc) y.@gm@r, 3sg (fem)
>   t.@gm@r, 1pl n.@gm@r, 2pl (masc) t.g@mr@.m, 2pl (fem) t.g@mr@.mt,
>   3pl (masc) g@mr@.n, 3pl (fem) g@mr@.nt.
The -t feminine marker is common to Afro-Asiatic languages, but I don't know
how they became a redundant prefix and suffix for singular nouns in the
Berber branch. Verb conjugation is similar to that found in Semitic
langugages, like the Arabic cases I posted earlier.

The Kabyle examples with all its schwas (written 'e' in Latin but not
written in Arabic) almost make one want to think the language has no
phonemic vowels!

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