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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > on 3/10/02 7:27 PM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote: > > > Rex May - Baloo wrote: [...] > What I mean is that blusa fawl is a > modifier-modified, but blufawl is not. By dint of being a compound, it has > a specific meaning, like a morpheme does, and not the intrinsically > ambiguous meaning of a modifier-modified. Even something as simple as pisa > pe can be ambiguous. If you're looking at pictures of people, 'small > person' could mean what you would think, but it could also mean the person > whose picture is small. But pipe means dwarf and that's that. [...] > How about this approach. Set all these prefixes to have noun meanings, what > one, this one, etc. Then the Xsa form would be a case of an attributive > noun at work. I'll bet there are a heap of contradictions there. May we're > (I'm) trying to hard to get things to fit a nice paradigm. [...] It seems to me that contrasts of the "gasa pe/gape" and "pisa pe/pipe" type will not occur with the correlatives (counter-examples?), and that this makes it reasonable to treat the correlatives as compounding prefixes, rather than as independent nouns--and, thus, having something like "vo" as a kind of indeterminate noun/pronoun to go with the correlatives when any other noun would be too specific. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _____________________________________________________ "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." -- Charles de Gaulle