Re: indefinite singluar article (was Agglutinating -> inflecting)

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 16:46:51 -0700 Stone Gordonssen
<stonegordonssen@...> writes:
> >>So the numeral "one" essentially works as a singular suffix?
> >Exactly. To make something explicitly singular, you have to suffix
> > -uv: "one" to it.
> Interesting. I was working on something for Laafaah earlier today -
> a
> postpostion |ha| to mean "a" or "one" of something - e.g. "putin"
> ["pMt1J]*
> would be "putin ha", pronounced ["pMt1JJ1] - but I wondered it it
> would sound too dorky.
-

That's somewhat similar to what i have/had in Rokbeigalmki.
One of my very few things i know about Early Rokbeigalmki is that it had
an indefinite article, which Rokbeigalmki lost.  The indefinite article
was a suffix /?a/, which contrasted with the definite article suffix
/?a::/.  Eventually, the definite article collapsed in on the indefinite
one, and kicked it out of the grammar system.
i.e.:

Early Rokbeigalmki:
amal-a /amal?a/ = a land
amal-ã /amal?a::/ = the land

Rokbeigalmki:
amal /amal/ = a land
amal-a /amal?a/ = the land

And then of course there's also the 'rhetorically personified' form,
|amál| /a'ma:l/ "Land".


-Stephen (Steg)
"An abundance of fungal filaments in sedimentary layers just above those
that mark the largest extinction of all time, at the end of the Paleozoic
Era, points to a sudden killing off of life across broad regions of
Earth: numerous fungi apparently were feasting on the victims."
     ~ 'earth system history', a geology textbook