Morphological analysis

Separating roots from suffixes in this language is difficult, since it is not obvious whether certain segments are part of the root and delete in one context, or are part of the suffix and delete in another context – or, are they epenthetic? Thus the root for ‘axe’ might be /tun/ or it might be /tu/ – if the former, some rule must delete /n/ in [tuka] ‘your sg axe’, if the latter, we would conclude that the 1sg and 3sg suffixes are /-nte, -nkwa/. If we assume the suffixes /-nte, -nkwa/, then we would need to explain why they appear as [-ne, -wa] after ‘clothes’ and ‘one.’ It almost seems that in order to get the answer to one question, you have to know the answer to all other questions.

The first step to solving this problem is to determine how many significant behavioral categories there are. By comparing the forms of ‘clothes’ and ‘eye,’ we can conclude that these two roots are identical in terms of behavior: the suffixes have the same shape after these two roots, and the following inflectional material is the same across the roots. We can also see that there are major differences in the form of the suffixes between‘eye’ and‘liver,’ although the roots look very similar and in half of the forms are exactly the same.

The data of (28) can be reordered by roots, according to the surface patterns of the apparent personal suffixes, and this reveals that there are three behavioral classes of roots.

In (a), the invariance of the portion that precedes ne in the 1sg, ga in the 2sg, wa in the 3sg, and re in the 1pl suggests that these roots are /kaj, aw, pi, ko, age, mu/, further leading to the conclusion that the suffixes are /-ne/ ‘1sg’, /-ga/ ‘2sg’, /-wa/ ‘3sg’, /-re/ ‘1pl’, or some phonologically similar form. Having identified the root–suffix boundary, we can now proceed with the phonological analysis of underlying forms and rules.