Quote:davidjackson...
It's a bold thought but - I'm going to suggest that we see here is evidence of a fusional grammer, where we get a content-word which is modified by prefixes and suffixes to give context to the original content-word.
If you look at the Janus Pairs, you will see a high proportion of ot- vords in the zodiac section and a high proportion of ch- vords in the plant sections, so that seems to suggest something like this might be happening, but one also has to consider, when studying this angle, that many VMS tokens are short, and if the prefix and suffix are modifiers (which is certainly possible), then the "base" or "root" is often frighteningly short and often very repetitive (and sometimes nonexistent), as are many of the "suffixes".
Nevertheless, based on staring at the text for too many years and having created a database of the VMS "prefixes" and "suffixes" (which is a separate concept from Janus Pairs), I think this idea of "fusion grammar" may have validity and I would be supportive of anyone pursuing it.