Re: Degrees of comparation

On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> I recently realized that from an internal POW, it'd make a lot of sense for
> Tairezazh to have "negative" degrees of comparation, that is inflections
> signifying "less" and "least". So, taking _dair_ "beautiful" as example, the
> full range of comparation 'd be:
>
> tshedair    most beautiful
> dadair      more beautiful
> dair        beautiful
> medair      less beautiful
> sizdair     least beautiful
>
> (All to be stressed on the _ai_)
>
> Are there any natlangs with a similar system?
>
And if I may pile another question on top of that one...are these
inflections just for comparative purposes ("less beautiful than X") or for
declarative purposes as well ("X is ugly")?  I'm looking into the latter
possibility in Simafira; going with a small number of roots, and
inflecting them heavily to derive many other related words, not just
comparatives.

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