Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Staving Mark J. Reed:
>How common are these in natlangs generally?  I know French has several;
>in the traditional (written) grammar <ne>...<pas> is one, and in
>the reanalyzed grammar of the spoken language, they're all over the
>place in the verb conjugations (e.g.  the first- and second-person plural
>markers /nu[z]/.../o~[z]/ and /vu[z]/.../e[z]/ in the present tense).
>But I can't think of any examples offhand in other agglutinating
>languages.
>
>Contemplating using them in a conlang, but it's supposed to be a
>naturalistic conlang, and wondering about realism.
>
I can think of a way in which they would be naturally produced. Start of
with a language that uses prefixes and suffixes to mark various grammatical
categories. A semantic shift then occurs which merges the meanings of
various prefixes and suffixes, so that they no longer occur independently.
Indeed, the  French negative circumfixes can be easily analyzed as
combinations of a prefix marking negativity in general (ne), and a variety
of suffixes marking the type of negativity (pas, jamais, personne, plus etc.)

Pete

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