> 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
>