Grammaticalized adjectives

Many languages have a small closed class of words or affixes which encode some of the most basic concepts for which we in English use adjectives. For example, Japanese "-i adjectives", unlike their "na adjectives", are a closed class (meaning that new -i adjectives cannot be created any more than English could just up and create a new preposition and have it make sense to anybody). Some of the concepts for which Japanese uses -i adjectives include: small, big, narrow, wide, old, new, red, white, black, dark, good, and bad.

In Mohawk, adjectives are stative verbs; due to Mohawk's polysynthetic nature, they end up looking like suffixes or (occasionally) circumfixes to the noun when used adjectivally. The particular pair that caught my attention was -owanen (big) and ni- -a'a (small, a circumfix).

Putting the two together, I decided that languages in the mërèchi language family needed to have a small, closed class of adjectival operations which would include all sorts of affixes plus possibly suprasegmental operations to boot. As a first step, I designate two classes of adjectives, a more basic first class for the most extreme sorts of word modification, and a tamer, more derivative second class:

First class (orthogonal)
big/small
dark/light
young/old
good/bad
hot/cold?

Second class (can be derived from 1st)
smooth/rough
easy/hard
long/short
wide/narrow
healthy/sick

I will be back later with the mërèchi forms of these adjectives. My goal is to have no pair work exactly the same way as another.