[YG Conlang Archives] > [ceqli group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > on 3/3/02 3:08 PM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote: > > > But the reason these remain unpalatable to me is that "blufaul" means > > "bluebird", and has the modifier preceding the head, as specified, but > > "pamzo" means "parentmale", "pexi" means "personfemale", and "frazo" > > means "siblingmale". They are all backwards. Why do only sex morphemes > > follow the head? > > > > blue bird blu faul > > female bird faul xi > > > > Or, is it only in compounds? > > > > white dog byel kan > > female dog xi kan > > bitch kanxi > > > > Sorry, but it still doesn't make sense to me. It seems very early in > > the game to be introducing irregularities into the morphology. That > > should be saved for the second generation of native speakers. > > You have just about broken my resistance down. Did I ever mention that I spent a year in an interrogation unit? We were trained to do just that. :-) > I think my insistence on > pexi, pezo, is nothing more than Occident-centrism. Assuming my > capitulation, would there be any better -forms- for either zo or xi to take > in a prefix position than their current ones? They both seem fine to me. However, wasn't it Ray who said (speaking of "jo" for "coffee") that it might be a good idea to save CV words for grammatical particles? That could be a reason to go for something longer. By the way, sometimes when Mandarin won't fit the morphology, a Sino-Japanese version of the "same" morpheme might. For example Mandarin <nan2>, "male", wouldn't work, but Sino-Japanese <dan> would. (Native Japanese <otoko> doesn't work, either.) -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _______________________________________________________ "When they wired us humans up, they really should have labeled the wires--don't you think?" -- Ed