Re: ?? Re: a "natural language" ?

On Friday, December 3, 2004, at 09:05 , Rodlox wrote:

[snip]
>> From:    Joerg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
>>>> "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:
>>>> In my experience with the languages of North America and the
>>>> Caucasus, this is not at all the case.  On top of all the other
>>>> things that make Georgian a difficult language to learn, it is
>>>> replete with suppletive verb (and noun!) stems,
>
>  is suppletive supposed to mean that it is supplementary?
Nope - a suppletive verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. are those that use what
were originally quite different words to fill in the gaps, so to speak.

In English the verb "to go" has lost its old past tense. It uses 'went'
which is strictly the past tense of a a rare used verb "to wend".

More often the bits and pieces no longer retain alternative, for example
the past tense of "to be" is "was ~ were"; there is no present tense form
of "was" in the way that a present of "went" is occasionally used. In fact
the verb "to be" is suppletive in very many languages.

Other example of suppletion is: good ~ better ~ best; bad ~ worse ~ worst.

>
>>>> a number of
>>>> different kinds of verbal and nominal ablaut,
>
>  what is an ablaut?
sing, sang, sung.

Grammatical inflexion by variation in the vowel of a root morpheme. In
many IE langs, including English, we have inherited this feature from PIE
where the common ablaut variation was between zero grade, o-grade and
e-grade stems, cf. ancient Greek:
e-lip-on = I left
e-leip-on = I was leaving
le-loip-a = I have left.

It is common in verbs in Germanic languages, as in 'sing, sang, sung''
singen, sang, gesungen' etc.


>>>> sometimes intersecting
>>>> one another but sometimes not,
>
>  how does something intersect?
Not a grammatical or linguistic term. It's meaning will depend upon
context, of which very little is given. But if it follows on from the
above, I would guess that the language has more than one type of ablaut
patterning and that some nouns and verbs exhibits mixes where some forms
show, say, pattern A and other parts pattern B.

Ray
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