Today we jumped into nominal morphology. Nouns are the best. As you look at nouns, start to think, “How could this noun evolve into a bit of morphology?” Conversely, when you look at a suffix or prefix, think about, “Where might this thing have come from?”

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides

Links

• Reddit AMA where we did a bunch of words for butterflies
• Etymonline.com
• A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary
• Proto-Indo-European Lexicon

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 113-135
• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 153-158 (Optional)
• AoLI Chapter 3, pp. 184-197

Practice

• Since we’ve started work on nouns, let’s create some words! Using some of the etymological resources listed above, come up with two new nouns that are likely to be basic, and post their proto- and modern forms to our #lexicon channel. (Try to do different ones from those who post before you, but I won’t hold you to having to create totally unique words. Do at least one unique one!)
• Using Wikipedia, find a natlang that has a case system (something other than unmodified and oblique—three or more cases, on the nouns and the pronouns), and post it to our #morphology channel. (Note: A language like Japanese that has postpositions that are explicitly for basic case? Still counts.)

Mastery

• (None Today)

Backburner

• Here’s an early look at MA3. You probably won’t be able to do much (or any) of it now, but I at least want you to start thinking about.
• Ditto MA4, which is the next stage of your language.