Re: palindrome to pluralize

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Vincent Pistelli <pva003@...> wrote:
> I just came up with an idea for a language I have been working on
> that I thought everyone would like. The idea is that if the nouns in your
> language are single syllables you can just turn the word into a palindrme to
> make it plural.
I don't see why it wouldn't work with words longer than one syllable;
though the longer the root words are, the longer the pluralized
forms will be, assuming I am reading you correctly (do an inverse
reduplication of all or part of the root to pluralize).

E.g., with monosyllables you might do,

tas > tasat / tassat
kin > kinik / kinnik

but it could work as well with disyllables etc,

funim > funiminuf / funimminuf
rasipo > rasipopisar

Or maybe your reduplication process never adds more
than one syllable; with monosyllables it forms a palindrome,
with longer words it does not.  So

funim > funimuf
rasipo > rasipo(a)r

There are various other things you could do with a more or
less palindromic reduplicative affix like this; I think some time
ago someone posted here a link to a study showing the most
common uses of reduplication cross-linguistically.  I vaguely
recall augmentatiion, diminution, and iterative aspect
as being among the common uses.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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