Reconstruction talk:Proto-Finnic/pitkä
Add topicLatest comment: 9 years ago by CodeCat
Inflection removed for now: most descendants indicate an irregular paradigm mixing forms with the stem *pitkä- and forms with the stem *pite-, but OTTOMH I wouldn't be able to say which forms exactly allowed which variants. --Tropylium (talk) 05:14, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
- Could you make note of this in the descendant list, for each language? Finnish only has the alternation between positive and comparative/superlative forms, I don't know what appears in the other languages. —CodeCat 17:40, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
- Already Finnish has many other "short-stem" formations in derivatives, e.g. pituus, pidentää, pituinen.
- Unfortunately standard references don't seem to indicate the full info very well. Some hunting thru the grammars and dictionaries of individual languages will be required to do that. (And as a whole other can of worms, I've also seen an argument that this alternation should be considered to indicate that the gradation pattern tk : t, as found in e.g. Karelian and Ingrian, was once much more widespread and was just later widely levelled.) --Tropylium (talk) 17:49, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
- Even Veps, which is normally very conservative with its consonants, only has the -tk- stem. Not sure about the comparative or derived terms though. I've created entries for all the languages I have sources for, except Karelian. —CodeCat 18:42, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
- The comparative and derived stems have -t-, though there are a few derivatives with -tk-. I get the impression that there is no mixing of the stems within a paradigm anywhere in Finnic, but that the -tk- stem only appears in the base adjective, while derivatives all have -t-. I'll have to see for Votic and Võro. —CodeCat 19:25, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
- Võro has pikemb and pikkus, though the latter apparently has piiutus and pittus as alternative forms. These perhaps point to the original -t-.
- For Votic I find only pitšep as the comparative, which is a regular/analogical formation. It has the derived noun pituuz, with pitkuuz as an alternative form. The strong grade -t- in the former is interesting, not sure why the ending has long -uu-. The verb pitšettää (“lengthen”) is analogically formed. —CodeCat 19:51, 31 January 2016 (UTC)