Re: The Melting

Sally Caves wrote:

> > > That's so familiar!  Much of my early Teonaht was pulling the words
out
> of
> > > the air.
That was certainly my method in the early days (I just found an old Kash
wordlist that only vaguely resembles  the present version!).  It's basically
still what Ido, although there is a base of several thousand forms,
generated with Langmaker from which to pick and choose; but it's also
possible to create new related forms using known historical morphological
tricks-- like adding or subtracting a nasal from the base, or adding an /r/.
The nasal process has led to--
tihas [tixas] glimpse <-- tikas 'to see' (the original form) --> tingas
[tiNgas] 'investigate, inspect'.  Other possibilities would be tiñas <
**tiNas, tiyas /tias/ (loss of the medial, probably a borrowing), te(C)as
implying *tikás, or a whole series with initial /r-/ (via *Nt- > **nd > **d
> r).  But these are conscious decisions.
I've caught at least two unconscious ones:
tanda 'zero' (I had in mind Indo. tanda 'mark'), but then I realized it
could be < ta 'not' by way of **ta-N-ta.

umit 'to use' -- later "unrelated" umut 'general, public, common' (I had in
mind Indo. umum).  When I made upit 'usual, accustomed' from umit, suddenly
I saw that umut could also be connected, though it would have to be a very
ancient variant.

Exactly how Kash came about, to me at least, is a very interesting story
which I'll get into another time. Meanwhile, Sally, Tom and Nik, let's keep
this very interesting thread going.