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Re: Aelya question

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Saturday, January 22, 2000, 19:20
On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Aidan Grey wrote:

> [snip interesting stuff on preverbs] > > 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!).
Lakhota has person/number marking which is infixing in a particular class of verbs. Boas and Deloria (1941) speculate that the material which preceded the p/n marker came from a set of locative prefixes. Not exactly like what your proposing, but similar enough to warrant a "go-for-it".
> 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.
I believe that the origin of the West Germanic ge- prefix for past participles lies in the set of preverbs which Germanic inherited from PIE. In fact, for a large class of verbs in German, the past participle is formed without ge- because there is already a prefix present on the stem. This is shown in the following pairs of verbs in which the first member appears without a prefix and takes the default ge- in the past participle, and the second member takes a prefix, which displaces the default ge- in the past participle. 1. lehren 'to teach (someone)' gelehrt 'taught' belehren 'to teach (something)' belehrt 'taught' 2. arbeiten 'to work' gearbeitet 'worked' verarbeiten 'to process' verarbeitet 'processed'
> 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?
I think the generic preverb is a nifty idea. As I showed above, German has something similar with the past participle marker ge-, presumably derived from an inherited IE preverb. If Aelya is derived from Old Irish (also IE) a parallel development doesn't seem far-fetched.
> 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?
Well, we certainly have different esthetics here. I like morphology well enough, but my approach has been a bit more modest with respect to the number of morphological markers I include. I've found that after a while the morphology settles down a bit into something I can live with all on its own. The Shemspreg verbal paradigm I gave in an earlier post (what, you didn't immdediately save and print out that message?!! :-) is all you get in the active form of a verb. It's pretty lean compared to the other PIE projects posted by Padraic and Andrew: no person and number inflection, only past/non-past distinctions, and aspect only in the past tense. Earlier drafts had a much more traditional PIE feel to them with person/number inflections and several different moods, etc. It just didn't feel right to have all of that morphological baggage, so I chucked it. No *logical* reason to do so, but it just didn't fit. I also worked with several T/A marking schemes before settling on the one I have now. That's how I solved that problem for Shemspreg; probably not very helpful to you, though. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu