What to do with this morpheme
What to do with this morpheme
Anthologica Universe Atlas / Forums / Department of Creativity / What to do with this morpheme / What to do with this morpheme

? twabs fair maiden
posts: 228
, Conversational Speaker message
I originally had a sound change suffixing /s/ onto the end of most words ending in a stop. Then I realized that I liked having both forms in -s and forms without it. Hence, the ancestor language has a suffix -tɑ that ends up becoming an -s tacked onto, ideally, 50±20% of (at least) nominals, which is probably then either a noun class or another set of inflections.

The question then becomes: what did it mean in the parent, and what does it mean in the daughter? Something like gender or another noun class seems to me unlikely to be marked with a suffix on that much of the vocabulary; something like collectivity seems unlikely to show up that often; using it as an intensifier seems like a good idea but I don't know what that could become in the daughter, and as I write this I come up with the idea of using it to mark definiteness, at which point I would normally delete the post, and go with that, except for (1) I kind of wanted an article, and (2) I'd also like to hear any better ideas people might have.