From: Rick McCallister
Message: 61891
Date: 2008-12-05
> From: Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...>Scott DeLancey, in his overview of Sino-Tibetan in Comrie's compendium on major world languages has a nice piece on this when he discusses compound words in which the head first becomes a prefix, then an unrecognizable dead morpheme and finally just a first syllable or first half of a first syllable. We see this in English lord and lady, where l-, la- is from Anglo-Saxon hlaf "bread, loaf".
> Subject: Re: [tied] Negation
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Friday, December 5, 2008, 3:25 PM
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Piotr Gasiorowski"
> <gpiotr@...>
>
>
> >
> > On 2008-12-05 19:54, Arnaud Fournet wrote:
> >
> >> Good joke, M. Gasiorowski.
> >
> > It was intended as a joke.
> >
> =======
> Nice,
> I somehow read it as a kind of provocation, not a serious
> analysis.
> With more practice, I might be able to read your mind !
> A.
>
> >> As far as I can see, all words are inherited or
> made with inherited
> >> morphemes.
> >
> > Nearly all.
> =====
> Which is not inherited ?
> Why this restriction ?
> A.
>
> > But don't confuse morphological changes (such as
> adding
> > affixes to a word) with phonetic ones. A new
> derivative is a _new word_,
> > even if the morphemes are old. If you compare any
> French word to its
> > Latin prototype or any English word to its early
> Germanic ancestor, in
> > the vast majority of cases they will prove to have
> become _much_
> > abbreviated. PGmc. *xauBuðan and *kuninGaz (3
> syllables each) became OE
> > he:afod and cyning (disyllabic) and these have been
> further shortened to
> > Mod.E head and king. Most of the surviving compounds
> formed in OE have
> > become similarly contracted (hla:f-weard > lord) or
> at least obscured,
> > losing some segments in the process (go:s-hafoc >
> goshawk).
> >
> > Piotr
> >
> =======
>
> This sounds a little bit spurious to me.
>
> For example, considering the fact that j(e) is a bound form
> in modern French
> is it a new word when compared to LAtin ego, which was a
> free form ?
> Is this a phonetic or a morphological change ?
>