Re: CHAT: query: where to start?

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:

> > Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >
> > Not necessarily.  Although it would help to learn more about the language
> > (more info can always help), what's really important is that you understand
> > patterns that occur across languages more than one language's patterns.
>
> Absolutely. That in mind, don't forget to look at Native America for
> other interesting examples of non-concatenative morphology, especially
> the languages of California (Miwok and Yokuts in particular). There
> are some very interesting patterns which don't look Semitic at all,
> but which play with the stem shape in similar ways.
Will try that, though when I hit bookstores I haven't seen a single
Native American language grammar, unless you count Quechua?

I may just wait until a couple weeks *after* classes begin and the fuss
dies down, and raid the linguistics dept. here at Cornell.  The worst
they can do is look at me funny, right?

> There are other kinds of modifications made for number and
> transitivity which involve processes such as gemination, infixation,
> and reduplication; person and modality are shown by affixation and
> cliticization, respectively.
<whistle>  I don't even understand all the terminology, but I'm trying to
learn...slowly.

> Semitic is (very) cool, but it's not the only game in town!
>
> Dirk
<wry g>  It just seems New and Exotic to me right now, I guess is why I'm
enamored of it at the moment.

YHL