Re: A small discovery...

En réponse à Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>:

> I've found out what the linguistic dead-end of Talarian prothetic
> vowels is all about. By way of introduction, some time in the distant
> past, nouns that started with r or n (and more rarely m, l, w, y,
> etc.) + a or o (v. rarely e or i) attracted a prefixed syllable, ha or
> xo (v. rarely he & hi). These words never supplanted the plain
> variety, but rather formed a kind of word pair that eventually
> developped a certain semantic relationship. By Old Talarian times, the
> plain words tended towards common names, while the prefixed words were
> "inner names", names of a more magical or at least sacred bent. Not
> necessarily secrte (though some things _do_ seem to have had secret
> names, the meaning of which is now not known). For example: nomun
> meant "commonly used name for something"  while xonomun meant "secret
> name of a thing"; or malcar, which meant "milk" and hamalcar, which
> meant "milk still in the breast".
>
> Apparently, this pairing was quite common and the word pairs were
> always closely linked. Since those bygone days, most of the pairs have
> been supplanted by one or the other (*nomar doesn't exist, but xonomar
> does). Or else both survived, but semantic drift worked its magick:
> malcmar means "animal milk", while xamalcmar means "treasure", by way
> of the adjectival meaning "bounteous", which I suspect is how "milk in
> the breast" was viewed in the old days.
>
> Padraic.
>
Wow! That's a really neat process of word creation and of semantic drift! And I
think it's very naturalistic! I'm trying to find also such processes in
"Roumant" (as well as fine semantic drifts), but it's not easy to think of any.

Christophe.