Re: A'liath: This is completely insane

Quoting Ian Maxwell <umlaut@...>:

> Well. I decided to completely rework my first conlang from scratch a
> while ago, having not really gotten too far with it in the first place.
> My new goal, in a nutshell, was "make Latin look isolating by
> comparison". And, well, if I did make it, it would do that. To a
> completely ridiculous degree.
>
> The basic idea was an extremely fusional language with an enormous
> number of single-morpheme prefixes for inflection. To that end, I
> gradually put together a list of everything the verbs would inflect for.
<Snip impressive list>

> Now, multiply all those numbers and see what you get.
>
> 152,409,600.
   Are you sure this number is correct? I just multiplied them and got
76,204,800. Granted, this is still a huge number, but it's half of your original
humber.

> I think I may have bitten off a tad more than I can chew here. I also
> think I'll be working on another, less frightening language for a while.
> One that doesn't have more affixes than words, say.
   Have you considered some agglutination? Also, if you ditch the 42
subject/object number combinations and 20 subject/object person combinations,
that reduces the number to 90,720, by my calculations. Also, remember that most
fusional languages have a great deal of overlap. For instance, look at the
pattern for a typical feminine noun in Russian:
N: sjestra
A: sjestru
G: sjestry
P: sjestrje
D: sjestrje
I: sjestroj
    The feminine adjectives are even less distinct:
N: kakaja
A: kakuju
G: kakoj
P: kakoj
D: kakoj
I: kakoj
    Context (and the nouns themselves) dismabiguate nicely, however. As an
aside, flipping through a grammatical table of all the cases, I count 186 noun
declensions, excluding adjectives and pronouns, but including exceptions like
mat' and doch'. There's also some spelling rules involved which up the count.
    Here's another idea: have fusional prefixes and suffixes. Double the -fixes,
half the work! Or make your morphemes semi-agglutinating: each inflection would
effect the one following by some simple and transparent sound change. In any
case, don't give up now! Just remember, there's some languge in the Caucuses
that has over a million verb paradigms (someone will refresh my memory, II
hope...)! If they can do it, so can you.
    :Peter

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