Re: Deriving words that aren't too long

Simon Kissane wrote:
> For example, I have the root "chit" (gift), and by adding the endings
> "il" and "a" I get the word "chitila" (to take). Is there any way I
> could still have regular derivation, but keep the size of the words
> down?
One way would simply be shorter derivational suffixes, like "l" instead
of "il", thus "chitla", or have derivations that combine several
meanings.  For examples, you could have a suffix "-e" meaning the same
thing as "il" and "a" together, thus "chite".  You could also use
contrastive stress.  I'm guessing that -a means verb (am I right?), if
so, perhaps you could simply stress nouns on the first syllable and
verbs on the second, thus "CHITil" would mean "taking", and "chitIL"
would mean "to take" (of course, that wouldn't work on mono-syllables
like your root "chit", but perhaps on mono-syllables you could add that
-a).  However, using a lot of derivation for what English and other
langs use independent bases for is bound to make your average word
length longer than it would be otherwise.

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