Re: CONLANG Digest - 24 Nov 2000

    The way I slightly understand it, one way to reconstruct a protolang from
 just one language might be... rrr..  sort of like the idea of 'underlying
 form'.  If, say, an affix has one appearance in some stems, and another in
 other stems, one might try to reconstruct an "original"/"underlying" form
 that in your modern language produces two forms due to sound change but in
 the protolanguage was only one, and perhaps find a way to reverse-engineer
 that kind of sound change elsewhere.  Er.  Or not.

    This is exactly what happens in my languages, Silindion. The genitive
suffix can be variously -ti, -ni, -di, or -ri  depending on the final sound
in the
stem of the noun.

  Examples:
  séhwa "twig"    >  sehwári "of a twig"
  ívan "familly"    >   ivándi   "of a familly"
  mar  "city"        >  márni     "of a city"
  oss   "wind"      >   ósti       "of wind"

    From this I have discovered that the original suffix must have been -di.
This
then assimilated to the base.
    The same sort of process occurs with the passive participle marker. This
could
be -dë, -të, -në, -ë, and -rë. The underlying suffix was -dai

Elliott