Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 December 10

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December 10

Co-occurrence of two Amharic affixes

Are there any Amharic speakers/scholars reading this page? Amharic has a marker for definite direct objects, the suffix -(ï)n. Indirect objects are marked using the prefix lä-, which, as I understand, is a proclitic preposition roughly equivalent to English "to". In compound nouns and noun phrases, the accusative marker is typically attached to the first word, and I know you can end up with constructions like yastämariwïn bet t'ärrägä "he swept his teacher's house" where yastämariwïn "the teacher's" has both the prefix y(ä)- (which I take to be another proclitic preposition, roughly "of") and the direct object marker. My question is, is it possible to have a word in Amharic marked with both the suffix -(ï)n and the prefix lä- (in which case the prefix obviously wouldn't be marking an indirect object)? In other words, does there seem to be any kind of co-occurence restriction on these two affixes? If they can co-occur, any examples would be greatly appreciated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Diacritic (talk • contribs) 22:27, 10 December 2009

You may want to check this with User:Taivo if you cannot get any answer here. The apophony, a phenomenon in stem or root modification to differentiate a lexical or grammatical category, is common in many languages. —Mihkaw napéw (talk) 17:38, 12 December 2009 (UTC)