#morphology

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

What color morphs are these guys? Are they standard crosses (the closest I can find) with the black just being more prominent and a brighter orange, or a different kind? Apologies if you already have these kinds somewhere on your account I don't believe I've seen them xd

Yes, these are Standard Cross foxes! The brighter orange is very likely due to editing. Cross foxes can have bright orange markings, but that extremely bright color would likely never occur, unfortunately. Cross foxes with more silver fur present are also called Silver Crosses (Pictured below) but I don't believe either of the foxes you showed would qualify.

TLDR: they're Standard Cross foxes like the one below, but they were edited to look more vibrant.

I've been thinking about Kshafa nominal declension (the Evil) again, and came to the conclusion that in some parts it is just too complicated to be kept that way in the regular system. Maybe for select irregular words, but not in general. So I've done some reworking (the Curse).

The Problem

The main problem is that of the indefinite ergative, locative singular, and nominative plural. They are the yellow cells in this table showing the paradigm of liman (I wrote a detailed post on how this paradigm evolved here):

As you can probably see, they have vastly different stems: li(m)V(n)- vs zhaen-, basically only the final nasal is the same. Now I support stem alternations wholeheartedly, but idk. This just feels a bit two much. These aren't even that used forms. like yes the ergative is a pretty important case, but the indefinite ergative, specifically? it just feels too underused to survive this. And so! I propose a single step of sweeping analogical leveling!

The Solution

For this example I will use the dummy form *rikep. The state of affairs just before the analogy takes place is like this:

There are 4 stems in the paradigm atp:

*rikap- the bare stem is the form used when the noun is followed by modifiers, so it's very common

*ricap- the stem used for most definite forms, so also a very dominant stem

*rikip- a stem that appears in a fair number of cells, both definite and indefinite

*rʲàcép- the talked about problem child, a stem that appears in only 1/5 cells, all of them of the less used indefinite.

The indefinite paradigm is the most varied, even though it is less common, and so it gets completely remodeled. The stem *rikip- gets extended into all indefinite forms barring the nominative singular, which keeps its special stem because of how common it is. The singular dative analogizes because its stem is seen as "the definite stem", and the yellow cells analogize because they are just too different.

Now we have a nice simple system of only three stems! a definite stem *ricap-, an indefinite stem *rikip- (which appears in three definite forms), and a basic stem which is derived from the indefinite stem through a vowel change ❤️ yay ❤️

But things don't stop here. After this period of analogy, sound changes continue to happen, and the final paradigm in modern Kshafa is this:

A new forth stem rikhi- is created for the indefinite dative and plural locative. It's the same as the regular general stem with just the stem final consonant dropping because of the prohibition of clusters, and these forms have consonant initial suffixes.

For those wondering, the updated paradigm of liman is this: