Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

On Monday, May 10, 2004, at 07:00 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 09:54:57PM -0500, Mark P. Line wrote:
>> 1. Circumfixes are affixes. The examples you give for French involve
>> clitics and free morphemes. You can analyze them as discontinuous
>> constituents (of which circumfixes are one type), but calling them
>> circumfixes would be quite unusual.
>
> Okay, if the alleged affix can appear by itself, then it's really
> a free morpheme; but what is the difference between an affix and a
> clitic?
According to Trask a clitic is:
"An item which exhibits behaviour intermediate between that of a word and
that of an affix. Typically, a clitic has the phonological form of a
separate word, but cannot be stresses and is obliged to occupy a
particular position in the sentence in which it is phonologically bound to
an adjoining word, its host."

Whether unstressed /n(@)/ has the phonological form of a separate word is
debatable. It's usually considered an incltic, but this probably has
something to do with the written language. I can understand that some
analyzes of _spoken_ French may well judge it to be a prefix.

However, the other part of the negative construct - pas, point, plus,
jamais, personne, rien etc. may, and do, occur a free morphemes in other
contexts. The French (and spoken Welsh) negative constructs may be, as
Mark says, considered as discontinuous constituents, but they are not
circumfixes in the normal sense of the word.
 =========================================================================

On Monday, May 10, 2004, at 12:17 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tamas Racsko <tracsko@F...> wrote:
[snip]
>>   I considered Greek augmentation/reduplication before my previous
>> posting but I refused in the end.
[snip]
>>   Thus it's not a circumfix because its elements are connected to
>> different functions: reduplication for the perfect, K for the mood
>> and -a for the tense.
Yes, indeed - the augments, redupilcation, and other tense/voice/mood
markers do have different functions. There's no evidence of circumfixes as
properly understood.

> You mean 'voice', not 'mood'.  -a- probably marks 'unmarked' past
> (i.e. as opposed to imperfect or pluperfect) as it occurs both in the
> present perfect and in the aorist.
I doubt that it was as systematic as that. There appears to have been a
good deal of remodelling and analogy at work in the forms of Greek verbs.
the -a- seems to have spread to other personal endings on the analogy of
the 1st person -a <-- /m=/.  The 3rd singular was -e and has remained so
till the present.

> (In Modern Greek, it now occurs
> in the imperfect!).
There was already confusion in ancient Greek in some verbs between second/
strong aorist & first/weak aorist, e.g. the strong aorist: e:lthon, e:ltes,
  e:lte etc (I came, thou camest....) is not uncommonly found with 2nd
persons e:ltas (sing.) ~ e:ltate (plural). The process has continued till
we have just one set of past tense endings which are added to both the
infective stem & the perfect stems, giving the two synthetic past tenses
of modern greek.

> How plausible a conlang would Classical Greek be?
Not at all plausible - the ancient language has too many variants and
dialects for any one to think it was anything other than a natlang. It's
not to the development of the Koine that we get anything approaching
uniformity. The artificially Atticizing written language that developed in
late Koine & became the official standard in the Byzantine period could
claim conlang status, I guess, as could the Katharevousa of 19th & 20th
cent intellectuals.
 =========================================================================
======

On Monday, May 10, 2004, at 04:52 PM, Douglas Koller wrote:
[snip]
> where the suffix isn't needed. Personally, I'm disinclined to see
> Western Eurolangs as circumfix-friendly, at least according to my
> understanding of "circumfix".
Greek isn't perhaps normally classed in the western part of Euroland, but
Greek is certainly a Eurolang. I'm disinclined to see Eurolangs generally
as circumflex-friendly, according to my understanding of "circumflex".

Ray
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Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760


Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
===============================================
"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760

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