Re: tolkien?

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 20:05:23 -0500, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 13:01:47 -0800, Elliott Lash <erelion12@...>
> wrote:
>
>> Something like 'sound association' happens in
>> Silindion, my main project. There are groups of roots
>> which have similar meanings and sound.
I have a kind of idea a lot of "sound association" is nothing more
mysterious than words being derived [in an unorthodox manner, generally]
 from ordinary roots... kind of like how -illion gets abstracted from
legitimate numbers and produces nonsense numbers of extreme size like
<zillion>, <jillion>, <godzillion>.  Hmrf...

I wonder, do many conlangs have enough semantopoeia to produce words like
that...


> It is *fairly* obvious (to me) that this is the case for a number of PIE
> roots, too. The most well-known example is uerg^/ureg, but possibly also
> perk^/prek^ and several others. I used to have a file of all the ones I'd
> identified, but it is escaping me at the moment. They're almost always of
> the form CeRC/CReC, sometimes CeHC/CHeC.
>
> What bugs the heck out of me is that although many of these root-pairs
> are obviously semantically connected, the exact meaning of the Re/eR
> alternation seems to be lexical rather than predictable.
It's called "Schwebeablaut" ('floating ablaut').  It's usually[?]
explained as back-formation of a new root based on the zero-grade, which
would be ambiguous--*pr=c could be from *perc or *prec after all... (Or it
could just be lexicalized metathesis, like English dialects with ["p@r4i]
<pretty> or [hVnd@rd] <hundred>.)



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