Morphology Continued

[Miatato]

[Uh-Oh]

I'm still not clear on it.

1) Is ku a pluralising prefix? Or partial reduplication?

2) Does this morphology rule out all syllable-boundary consonant clusters except "nC"; for example, tosma and katsoi couldn't occur?

3) If we wanted to adapt a word like "elephant", it couldn't be elefant or elefante, could it? It would have too many moras. To say nothing of a word like "molybdenum" or "protactinium". Or am I misunderstanding?

[kadani]

1) I think this one was just supposed to give an example so it could be either.

2) pretty much so, though we could have other codas which also form a mora, I guess.

3) We could still have words with more mora, the examples just used three ones.

[PeteBleackley]

OK, here's another example

zavusa (bee)

Singular Plural
Nom zavusa zazavusa
Acc zamvusa zazamvusa
Gen ziavusa zaziavusa
Sec zaavusa zazaavusa

So, I was intended the plural marker to be reduplication of the first mora, and the syllable final n to assimilate to the following consonant.

The trimoraic structure applies to native roots, so derived words or load words can be longer, eg zaviuvusa (honey)

[Uh-Oh]

[Miatato]