Re: Ablaut and Infix Origins

Jeffrey Jones wrote:

> quoting Eric Christopherson
>> Funny you'd mention that -- I finally got around to reading some of
>> _A natural history of infixation_, by Alan C. L. Yu (Amazon: <http://
>> www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Infixation-Theoretical-Linguistics/dp/
>> 019927939X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203837054&amp;sr=8-1>). It
>> talks about four origins: metathesis; entrapment; reduplication
>> mutation; and morphological excrescence and prosodic stem
>> association.
>
> Someone was kind enough to send me the whole text in a private email.
I'd like to get acquainted with this kind person, too.

> (and I personally find infixes completely unintuitive).
I have a causal infix -ra- in Suraetua which I think works fine. Most
syllables in that language are CV, so it's usually easy to find a
place for it. For example 'know' is SURE, and 'teach' is SURAE (the R
is weak in final syllables).

I think it's a useful tool that I'd like to know how to utilise more.

LEF