Saturday, December 16, 2017

The origin of stem-changing nominal morphology in Paiodd

Paiodd has what I call verbal and nominal inflections, differing in both the quality of the root vowel and the voicing of the final consonant. The verbal might also be called 'adverbial' since those are the functions it covers - modifying the verb, while the nominal is essentially a genitive, modifying other nouns. I usually define them as indicating that the nouns is related to the verb or another noun, respectively, with additional suffixes specifying the nature of that relationship.

I surmise that the Canodd system was a little different, with what I am calling "open" and "closed" inflection, where open-inflection indicates that the noun is somehow dependent on another word, either noun or verb, while the closed-inflection indicates that the noun is the head of a noun-phrase. This often means it is an argument of the verb, but not necessarily.

As an example of how it works, if we were to say "The tall, ugly man's blue felt hat" the words for "tall" and "ugly" would be nouns in the open-inflection, while "man" would be closed-inflection. Likewise "blue" and "felt" would be open-inflection, while "hat" would be closed. The closed-inflection words are not necessarily arguments of the verb (though in context, it is likely that "hat" would be) and consequently both open-inflection and closed-inflection nouns can take the particles that specify the exact relationship between the inflected noun and whatever it modifies.

All that to say that the system is as follows:

Paiodd verbal-inflection < Canodd open-inflection

Verbal inflection marked by "weakened" vowel and voiced final consonant in Paiodd, while in Canodd, the open-inflection is the marked form, and closed is unmarked. The specific marker is a suffixed -ə, which triggers intervocalic voicing, accounting for the voicing change in the later verbal-inflection. I had been thinking of the vowel change as a sort of lenition, but I just consulted Trask on the matter, and, as I should have known, lenition is a process affecting consonants only.


Even so, the idea of hierarchy of vowels according to perceived “ strength” is a pretty essential one to Paiodd and its antecedents, and thus will remain.

Some examples:

Paiodd togg 'shape, form' VBL tag-, NML toc- < Canodd *tok, OPEN *tagə, CLSD *tok
P. budd 'blade' VBL bod- NML but- < C. *put, OPEN *pode, CLSD *put
P. cadd 'body of water' VBL ced-, NML cat- < C. *kat, OPEN *kedə, CLSD *kat

NOTE: This does not account for changes in word-initial consonants. I have a few ideas for that, but for the moment, I have simply assumed the underlying consonants are the voiceless equivalents of their Paiodd reflexes, which in some cases means no change.