Re: Weekly Vocab 7 in Kash (part)

On Tue, 13 May 2003 08:12:06 -0700, Garrett Jones <conlang@...>
wrote:

>I want Minyeva to be typologically perfect, in the sense that it follows all
>of the orders of a head first language. i haven't been able to find much
>information on the correlation between head first syntax and head first
>compounding, though. I see that Bahasa indonesia is SVO (and thus head
>first). There are also the factors of learnability, too... how hard would it
>be for people to get used to head first compounding? And is there a
>correlation between head-first compounding and prefixing? I think languages
>tend to favor suffixing in general even when they are head first, and even
>though suffixing is a head-last phenomenon.
Head-first compounds are hard to get used to if your native language is
English. One thing that I've never really been satisfied with in Lindiga is
the combination of head-first compounds with suffixes for declension. So
you have to put the suffixes in the middle of the compound, and it doesn't
really act like a contiguous word. And it doesn't seem right to put the
case suffixes at the end. Example:

Lindiga _lambi-nzélat_ "sky blue", locative case: _lambé-nzélat_ (_nzélat_
is the genitive case of _nzéla_ "sky").

If I wanted to put the case suffixes at the end, it would be something like
_lambinzélati_, _lambinzélaté_ (or _lambinzéli_, _lambinzélé_). This makes
it look like "sky" is the head of the compound, since it has the suffix,
plus nouns don't take the same case endings as adjectives.

So if you have head-first compounds, I think it'd simplify things to use
prefixes. Not that I've ever had the need to put "sky blue" in the locative
case, but if compounds were less awkward in Lindiga, I might use them more
productively.

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