Language desk
< December 9	<< Nov \| December \| Jan >>	December 11 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

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)[reply]