New words can be derived from existing dictionary entries either by adding specialised word‐endings (see suffixing, below) or by merging together whole words in the process called compounding. This is the mechanism that produces such somewhat arbitrary English words as “waterfall”, “beachfront”, or “babysit”.
The rules governing this language's compounding system are similarly flexible: words which occur as a set phrase can simply merge together into a single longer word, often dropping grammatical endings and/or introducing a to avoid illegal strings of consonants:
Placement of stress in these compounds is usually regular, ignoring the stress of the constituent words; jí plus epá is jiépa.
Demonstrative adverbs like nullu (“here” – see VId) and unhyphenated number‐words like sachasoikh (“ninety” – see IIIc) are also examples of compounding.
Many special endings are available to turn existing words into related concepts, often changing word categories (turning verbs into nouns or the like):
This is the random‐syllable‐generator I used to fill out the lexicon; I include it in this package because that's simpler than trying to describe the full set of abstract phonotactic constraints, and because it's as near as I can get to “releasing the source code”.
A=1 | A=2 | A=3 | A=4 | A=5 | A=6 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
B=1 | m | n | n | r | l | — |
B=2 | p | t | t | ch | k | — |
B=3 | p | d | t | j | g | — |
B=4 | b | d | s | s | s | — |
B=5 | f | f | th | th | kh | — |
B=6 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
C=1 | C=2 | C=3 | C=4 | C=5 | C=6 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
––– | i | e | a | a | o | u |
D=1 | D=2 | D=3 | D=4 | D=5 | D=6 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
E=1 | m | n | n | r | r | l |
E=2 | m | n | n | r | r | l |
E=3 | p | t | t | ch | k | k |
E=4 | f | th | s | s | s | kh |
E=5 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
E=6 | — | — | — | — | — | — |