[Lexicog] honorific horse

[Andrew Shimunek]

>Getting back to /morilo-x/, looking at the morphology of the verb 
>itself shows that it's of a *very* early strate of the language, >since 
>it uses the rather ossified -la- denominal verbalizing particle >attached 
>to the noun *mori "horse".

 Personally, I would not call this an "ossified" suffix. In fact, /-l/ (a voiced lateral fricative) in the modern Khalkha dialect of Mongolian (< Proto-Mongolic *-lA) is actually still used today for forming new verbs. For example, modern Khalkha /atag-l-x/ (Cyrillic <ataklax>). Also, /xarma-l-x/ ~ /karma-l-x/ (Cyrillic <karmalax>) 'to pick-pocket', from Russian <atak> and <karman>. Also, despite the orthographic convention, there are in fact no long vowels in non-initial syllables in Khalkha (phonemically or phonetically, as proven by recent research by Svantesson et al 2005; something is also mentioned in Janhunen 2003), and what are generally represented in the orthography as short vowels in non-initial syllables are in fact non-existent phonemically and are phonetically realized by means of schwa epenthesis. Thus, what you write as /morilox/ according to this new evidence is actually represented phonemically as /mor'-l-x/ and is phonetically realized as [/moer.l3x] (where [3]
 crudely represents a schwa, [oe] a lax mid front rounded vowel, [/] stress and ['] palatalization).

Best,

Andrew


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