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--- In westasianconlangs@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23"
<etherman23@...> wrote:
> Perhaps the whole paradigm could be inherited.
That's certainly a possibility. I knew that Michif is an example of a
language that borrowed the paradigm along with the verbs (and Copper
Island Aleut I *think*). However, while I was researching a solution
for my question I came across an interesting paper on loanverb
strategies from a variety of languages and was intrigued to see that
this strategy (borrowing the paradigm) was a lot more common that I
thought. Another strategy combines aspects of the native paradigm
with that of the borrowed paradigm; the only example I remember off
the top of my head is Mingrelian, where borrowed Georgian verb stems
also use the Georgian preverb (e.g. a-) rather than the native
Mingrelian preverb (e.g. o-), but have Mingrelian endings. There were
other more interesting examples from languages totally unrelated, but
unfortunately I can't remember them at the moment. Native languages
in South America also good examples of borrowing the paradigm.
Switching from verbs to nouns, I know that Farsi (at least in its more
literary registers) borrowed Arabic's broken plurals and whatnot along
with the Arabic nouns, though it's becoming much more common to simply
add the Farsi pluralizer to the Arabic singular noun.
Okay, so now an interesting question based on the above example of
Georgian: if a language were borrowing verbs from Georgian, but
(unlike Mingrelian) had a verbal system totally unlike and unrelated
to Georgian, (and without the borrowing the paradigm) what form of the
Georgian verb would be used? Did Ossetic borrow any verbs from
Georgian I wonder, and if so, what do they look like in Osetic?
Because surely they couldn't do much with the strings of consonants
like -tskh- ("bake"). Mingrelian has the advantage in that it already
has a verbal paradigm similar to that of Georgian.
Cheers,
Eamon