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En réponse à "R. Eamon Graham" <robertg@hidden.email>: > Greetings Romanceconlang list members, > > I'm hoping someone could help me with Occitan derivational > morphology, specifically this: I would like to know how to derive > an adjective or > language name ending from a noun ending in -naire. For example, in > French Nice becomes Niçois and Paris becomes Parisien. How would I > do the same thing with a noun ending in -naire? I am deriving the > name for my own Romanceconlang from the Occitan word "caminaire." > Well, I'm not a specialist of Occitan (though I tried to base my Narbonósc on a version of it), but I already find an ending -aire quite doubtful for Occitan. Or you sure the ending is not French? French -aire is usually -aro in Spanish, and in Occitan it would be probably -ar or -are. As for derivative endings, they are not triggered by the end of the word they are added to in French and in other Romance languages. There's nothing in the word "Nice" that obliges it to get the -ois ending (indeed, it could as well have -ais which is only a variant of -ois, or -ien which is an entirely different ending). In the same way, nothing except history made -ien the preferential suffix for "Paris". But if you want to play safe, take an ending like French -ais or Spanish -és (Occitan must be in between :)) ). it's quite standard to derive language or inhabitant names, a bit more than -ien for instance. I did that too. In Narbonósc -ósc is the Narbonese equivalent of French -ais. It's pronounced [os] (and gets the stress) and derives (like Spanish -és and French -ois/-ais) from Latin -ensis [e:sis] which was used to name regions in Latin (Narbonósc is in fact the direct descendant of Latin Narbonensis, the name of the province making the South East of what is now France during the Roman Empire). It's written with a final silent -c because the ending -ensis was crossed and confused with an ending -esk of Germanic origin. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.