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Aelya question

From:Aidan Grey <arachnis@...>
Date:Saturday, January 22, 2000, 10:14
I know this must seem weird, since I _should_ be the authority, but here
goes!

    Okay, so, Aelya is now derived from Old Irish - without ANY Tolkien
influence (okay, a little, but mostly only in morphology). OI had all these
great preverbs which modified or otherwise gave meaning to the verb itself
(ad-cii, see, where cii doesn't mean anything, or do-icc, come, where icc is
also part of several other cpds (ar-icc, con-icc, etc.)) and also served to
mark several tense/mood/aspect type features (ro-  common for perfectives,
na-  for negatives, etc.) as well as (boy this is a long sentence!) serving
as particles allowing for prefixing objects (something like ad-e-ciu for
PRV-him-I-see).

    Okay, so with that out of the way, here's waht I'm hoping for/having
probs with:

    I don't want to keep the preverbs in most cases (otherwise I'd end up
with the problem of Mn. Irish, where a zillion verbs begin with t-  because
of the old do- preverb), keeping them only when they're meaningful
(differentiate several different verbs with the same root). In this case,
I'm thinking to use the meanings of those preverbs to form derivational
prefixes, or to use phrasal verbs (jump up to, e.g.). But, I do want to keep
the "infixing" of objects. I thought I'd use a generic preverb (like the
ever handy a-) for cases like this (instead of OI's ro-, too many uses of
that one preverb!). I also like the idea of preverbs as aspect marking, and
I really would love to incorporate the zillion markers various people on the
list have used, and that are common in many Native American langs. BUT, I
don't want a zillion marlkers, cause I'd never use them all - too complex.

    So, I guess what I'm asking is this/these:

     Anyone else faced this problem? What did you do?
    Any idea on how to incorporate preverbs but on a smaller scale, but
still as useful?
    Is my generic preverb idea any good? Anyone have better ideas?

    Second query:

    I have another problem - I love morphology. So, I keep trying to add
ooodles (3 o's is on purpose!) of neat stuff, like cases like Finnish,
morphosyntactic qualities like Navaho, a gajillion (it's a technical term)
deictics, and so on. On top of that, I'm never happy with the affixes or
umlauts I assign. How do you folks deal with this - I can't be the only
person here (and I know I don't have time to start ANOTHER lang - I'd like
to finish this one!) with this problem? I recently convinced myself to only
have three cases (nom, gen, and oblique for use with preps and such, acc and
dat being shown by word order), but I have no idea where to derive the
endings/declension from. Any ideas?

    Aidan