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Re: Unilang: the Morphology

From:Pavel Adamek <pavel.adamek@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 24, 2001, 7:25
Andreas Johansson wrote:

>If I have, for example, a completely regular auxlang where >the sg nom takes no ending, the pl nom takes _-s_, >the sg acc takes _-n_ and the pl acc takes _-k_, >this would mean that the lang is inflective and not agglutinative
IMHO it is matter of point of view. I can see it as both inflective and agglutinatave, but I agree that it looks more similar to the inflective than the agglutinative ones, because in agglutinative laguages, the morphemes are usually syllabic. And instead of _-k_, the pl acc would take _-sn_ in purely agglutinative languge.
>Neither would it be isolating, >since atleast _s_ and _k_ can't be words by themselves.
In Czech, there are words "s" and "k", although they are not postpositions but prepositions, and in position before words with initial cluster, there are their syllabic variants "se" and "ke": "s tebou" with thee, "k tobe`" to thee, "se mnou" with me, "ke mne`" to me. But back to the our example language: "Edé m peski n." I am eating a fish. "Edé mi s peski k." We are eating fishes. The words "m" ,"s" and "k" are auxiliary grammatical words and therefore they can be unstressed, and unstressed syllables can be reduced. So the pronunciation is: ["Ede:mp"EskIn], ["Ede:mIsp"EskIk] We can even write "Edé m pesk i n.", "Edé m i s pesk i k.", where "i" is the particle denoting animate noun. In proto-language it was probably: "Edé me peske je ne.", "Edé me je se peske je ke.", Pavel

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Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>