Re: THEORY: derivation question

"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
> True at present - but it won't stop someone coining such a word if s/he
> feels like it.  A hundred years ago 'normality' was the only "legitimate"
> abstract noun derived from 'normal' - you couldn't say 'normalcy'.  Now
> 'normalcy' may be found, especially when talking of political or economic
> circumstances.
True.  And as I pointed out later, changes can occur.

> But I got the impression that Patrick was more concerned with the sort of
> problem of how we know that, e.g. 'father' is cognate with Latin 'pater',
> Irish 'athair' etc all being derived from PIE *p@te:r
Yeah, I think maybe you're right.

> But if you want to make
> the thing 'more realistic' or to have it regarded, at least by some people,
> as a serious undertaking then, I'm afraid, some syste, is required.  There
> isn't _a system_ that one can just apply.  The way languages have evolved
> differs quite a bit.  But the thing to do is to develop a system.
Of course, you can always have doublets or triplets, as with English
scatter/shatter, where one is a native word, with the Anglo-Saxon
pattern of changes from whatever the original form was, and the other is
borrowed from Old Norse with its own patter of changes.  I have several
of those in Watya'i'sa, mostly in the form of pitch-patterns.  For
instance, saga' means "to speak", while saga` means "to prophesy".  The
grave indicates that suffixes are in low pitch.  In the main dialect,
almost all verbs ended with a level pitch, i.e., saga'u'dh = I speak,
the pitch remains high.  But in a few dialects, falling verbs became
common, and some were borrowed into the main dialect, often with a
slight difference in meaning, so that saga'udh means "I prophesy".

--
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was hanged." - Irish proverb
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