Re: Small Derivational Idea

The conlang I'm working on takes some ideas from Semitic nonconcatentative
morphology in deriving forms from stems, but I've tried to come up with a
more logical way to go about doing this  through a complex set of sound
changes (i- and u-umlaut, syncope, reduction, lenition, fortition,
palatalization, chain shifts, mergers, splitting ---- all have been applied,
making the phonetic history of the language a tangled mess).

There is a 'negative stative verbal' stem that results from apophony from
the negation prefix 'ú-' ('not').

For example:

*s@t
'grease, fat, oil' (edible)

u:-s@t-a 'to be non-fatty, non-greasy'
...which reduced to úsda [?y:.st@] in the modern language.

The positive of this would be 'sada' [sQ:.D@]: 'to be greasy, to be fatty'.

Pretty different from each other, but well-understood (at least orthography)
based on the root  *s-t (and the thematic vowel '@', but that's another
story altogether).

----- Steven A. Williams

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 4:34 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>wrote:

> I was just brushing my teeth this morning, and I looked over
> at my lotion (uh...I mean my wife's lotion, sure...), and noticed
> that it said the following:
>
> Clean
> Greasy Feeling!
>
> That seemed odd to me.  Then, of course, I remembered that
> what it actually said was:
>
> Clean
> Non-Greasy Feeling!
>
> (Un)fortunately, something was covering up the bottle in such
> a way that it was covering up just the "Non-", so all I saw was
> "Greasy Feeling!"  (Oh, I should mention that this is actually
> right-aligned text, so I could still read "Clean".)
>
> This got me to thinking: What if there were a conlang that, for
> whatever reason, had an alphabet not unlike English's (linear)
> and took this seriously?
>
> It occurred that the only way to prevent this would be using an
> infix:
>
> Greasy = "greasy"
> Groneasy = "non-greasy"
>
> Though if you wanted to be absolutely sure, it should probably
> be marked with a combination circumfix and infix:
>
> Nogroneasyon = "non-greasy"
>
> This would ensure that the above could never happen.  At best,
> one would have to have obscuring columns on either side, and
> a very thin one in the middle, but even then, the viewer is likely
> to notice that the word "greasy" is longer than it ought to be...
>
> That's my conlanging thought for the day.  :)
>
> -David
> *******************************************************************
> "sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
> "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
>
> -Jim Morrison
>
> http://dedalvs.conlang.org/
>