Re: isolating conlangs

Damian Yerrick wrote:

>> Can all the particles be used as independent words, or are any
>> of them bound morphemes?
>
> Can Cispa <ip> be used apart from a verb?
Yes, since Cispa can have sentences without verbs (and in fact particles
like "ip" modify the whole verb phrase; they might as well be called
adverbs).

Could you say "ip" by itself, as a response to a question for instance?
I haven't thought specifically about that. It could be like the English
word "the", which can't occur by itself but is generally considered a
separate word, although I think it makes just as much sense to say "ip"
as a concise reply where in English we'd say something like "Yes, I did"
or "yes, they were".

Not that I ever claimed anything about Chispa morphology, but it does
have a handful of prefixes and suffixes.... I haven't got any good
examples of isolating conlangs, except maybe for Vuki Lialia, which uses
"ta" to mark a verb as perfective. In the case of Vuki Lialia, "ta"
_can_ be used in isolation, as an exclamation meaning "Done!". But a
case marker like "ŋa" (genitive/accusative) doesn't make much sense by
itself, so I guess you could argue whether it counts as a separate word
or not.

(Now that I've mentioned Vuki Lialia, I know the number collectors out
there are going to want the numbers 1-10, so here they are: nu, vɔ, mɛ,
vina, hana, pɔtɔ, ŋana, tɔkɔ, tana, pɨ.)