#morphemes

Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among some morphemes

From ‘Micro to macro - The levels of language’, where we took advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspctive often found in Linguistics 101 classes

So help me....

First you insult me by asking me to translate something into Zhyler, then you follow it up by pointing out a mistake, which leads me to discover two other mistakes, and to top it all off, you're using the word morpheme?! Who even are you?!

All right, now you have homework. First, watch this:

David's LCC1 presentation from literally 2006 that should have put an end to this whole morpheme nonsense

Then read this:

A kind of write up of the same presentation written eight years later because people were paradoxically still on about this morpheme nonsense

Then these three posts in this order on Tumblr.com, an obscure microblogging website you probably haven't heard of:

First post

Second post

Third post

Now for your question.

Yes, I got the frickin'-frackin' plural wrong! The stupid language is a stupid homage to not-stupid Turkish, and plurals in Turkish are associated with -lar/-ler. I turned that into the stupid past tense in stupid Zhyler and I STUPID FORGOT THAT in the first stupid post so I stupid got it wrong. Okay?!

But that's not all. Apparently in my own documentation I exclusively used IPA; I didn't have any kind of romanization. The romanization was invented for my website. I forgot this and so misread [j] as <j> (i.e. [dʒ]). I thought it was odd there was so much [dʒ] in this translation, so I feel better about that, but it means that every place you say <j> (and its associated orthographic letter) it should've been <y>. So that was wrong, too.

Anyway, after all that, I did correct the stupid translations, so here they are. First, enemies:

Then friends:

There! Art thou happy?! I'm not even going to get into how the plural is supposed to produce an even number of syllables but I don't remember what happened with case/possessive suffixes, so I don't know if it's literally supposed to be vedgayayum and širkÿyayum which seems ridiculous, but what isn't with this ridiculous language?

In Amerikan english, gibberish looks like long vowels, glottal noises, and uncommon consonant clusters like "gloop" and "fagglewang", and "clushtz". I think we also tend to make syllable number part of the gibberish, with long words being extra gibberish, along with the unusual and absurd mix of morphemes, like "exconfuckable" (im crying 😂). Syntax is usually all fucked up since english in general has a pretty strict SVO structure and is less reliant on grammatical cues for words' role, so saying "big the for pickle taste I ate" to say "I ate the big pickle for taste" is complete nonsense, and saying it like "biggle thuh frummer pickledickle tastie eye-why atebate" is complete gibberish. Its english-like, but ultimately unintelligible.

Funny sounds to us seem to take on short and low vowels with harsh consonants in words like "fickle" and "fucker". But also reduplication and certain syllable structures with "funny" vowels like "dangalang" and "doodoo" (this shouldnt be this amusing 🤣). Clitics are used a lot too emphasize the funny and vowels may be changed in words ("da" instead of the, "päper" instead of "paper").

Zygology

Word-Building

- Tom Scott: Long and Short Words: Language Typology A short, engaging explanation of how different languages engage in word-building with an on-screen narrator and graphics. Length: 4m36s. Captions: human-edited (English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Slovakia, Spanish, Thai).

- TheTrevTutor: Word Creation This video explores different processes used in English to create words, including compounds, clipping, blending, back-formation, acronyms/initialisms, and coinage. Length: 7m56s. Captions: auto-generated.

Blog posts/diagrams

- All About Linguistics: What is Morphology? A summary of morphology, including diagrams and examples of free/bound morphemes and simple/complex morphology trees.

- Morphology 5: Word Analysis & Affixation An explanation with diagrams of how English uses morphemes to create words. Includes short review questions and activities throughout lessons.

- Morphology: Prefixes, Suffixes, Roots Lists of morphemes in English organized by position in words and then by category.

So this is obviously a work in progress, BUT here are some new Ori derivational morphemes! Yay! I like them. 

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Derivational Morphemes

-u

This morpheme comes from the word hu‘one’, and it often added to adjectives to create a noun.

lil ‘small’ --> lilu ‘small one’

truma ‘red’ --> trumu ‘red one’

It can also be used with other nouns, however:

cleppa ‘poison’ --> cleppu ‘poisoned one’

-ya

-ya is a gerund marker; it nominalizes a verb (transitive or intransitive):

ta ‘speak’ --> taya ‘speaking’

aste ‘reckon’ --> asteya ‘mathematics’

pra ‘listen’ --> praya ‘listening; educational lecture’

lyeppe ‘enjoy’ --> lyeppeya ‘enjoyment’

clasin ‘become flat’ --> clasinya ‘flattening; (of a person) becoming boring’

-uya

-uya is a suffix that indicates ‘beginning of V/N’, meaning it can attach to either a verb or a noun.

Note that if there is a vowel at the end of the bound morpheme, that first vowel is deleted before -uya.

lyannis ‘make a pilgrimage’ --> lyannisuya ‘beginning of a pilgrimage’

ta ‘speak’ --> tuya ‘beginning of a speech’

syala ‘rule, reign’ --> syaluya ‘beginning of the reign of a king’

becul ‘cave’ --> beculuya ‘antechamber of a cave’

besti ‘earth, ground’ --> bestuya ‘top layer of soil’

cul ‘moon’ --> culuya ‘new moon’

Sometimes the meaning of this suffix implies smallness due to something being “only the beginning of [and no more]” V/N:

lar ‘laugh’ --> laruya ‘a short laugh, a clipped laugh’

lubela ‘secret’ --> lubeluya ‘just a little secret’

-on

-on is an augmentative suffix that applies to nouns.

lyuha ‘dog’ --> lyuhon ‘large dog’

ori ‘man’ --> orion ‘big man’

mil ‘tree’ --> milon ‘large tree’

-li

-li is the opposite of -on, a diminutive suffix for nouns.

lyuha ‘dog’ --> lyuhali ‘puppy’

bistraya ‘flower’ --> bistrayali ‘bud, small blossom’

coru ‘rock’ --> coruli ‘pebble’

bu ‘house’ --> buli ‘room inside a house, chamber’

hesta ‘mountain’ --> hestali ‘hill’

-e

-e is a common ending for adjectives (e.g. nale ‘true’, clippe ‘rotten’, balnye ‘great’). It can also function as a derivative morpheme for adjectivization from nouns.

Usually, if there is a final vowel on the base noun, it is replaced by -e.

hustu ‘belief, trust’ --> huste ‘trusting’

cleppa ‘poison’ --> cleppe ‘poisonous’

galacil ‘smoke’ --> galacile ‘smoky’

lubela ‘secret’ --> lubele ‘secret (adj.)’

roru ‘darkness’ --> rore ‘dark’

cli-/clip-

This is a pejorative prefix that usually affixes to nouns. It comes from the adjective clippe‘rotten, sour’. The cli- form precedes consonant-initial words, whereas the clip- form is used with vowel-initial words.

prasta ‘mind, thoughts; behavior, actions’ --> cliprasta ‘betrayal; treason’

olta ‘tomb’ --> clipolta ‘a badly made or ritualistically wrong or unclean burial’

gerum ‘death’ --> cligerum ‘a dishonorable death’

ha-

This prefix can be used as either an augmentative or an ameliorative (“good N”) prefix.

pyelli ‘pain’ --> hapyelli ‘great pain’

selis ‘teacher’ --> haselis ‘a good teacher’

lyuha ‘dog’ --> halyuha ‘a particularly loyal dog’

bela ‘word’ --> habela ‘eloquence’

belta ‘wind’ --> habelta ‘a sudden warm wind in the winter’

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