Re: Eliding repeated morphemes: synthesis vs analysis

--- "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:

> Just something I was thinking about.  It started
> with a post to the
> Latin study mailing list
<snip>

>
> This started me cogitating.  At first it seemed
> obviously a difference
> between analysis and synthesis, but now I'm not so
> sure.  Consider the
> English possessive in -'s, for instance.  Is that
> considered an analytic or
> synthetic feature?  We say "Mark and Jody's house",
> not "Mark's and
> Jody's house".  Is that "Mark and (Jody's)", with
> the -'s simply understood
> to be applied to "Mark" as well, or is it "(Mark and
> Jody)'s", with
> the -'s actually being applied to the phrase as a
> whole?
I was cusrious to see what my new conlang Tazhu does.
Since I am not "designing" it, but just writing it
down and observing what rules emerge after the fact, I
had to go back and look at the corpus.

Verb tense is marked with a prefix to the verb.  In
the earliest writings the prefix is present on all
verbs in the sentence. A few later sentences had the
prefix only on the first verb.

Noun case is marked by a prefix on either the noun or
on the first adjective that applies to the noun, so
that prefix only ever occurs once per sentence.

Pozo sepalu. I have a ball.
Pozo selozhe palu. I have a red ball.
Pozo seruge palu en daliu. I have a big ball and a
doll.

Possesives are a separate particle that would be
alanogous in the above example to: "Mark and Jody
their house..."

--gary