Re: Self-Segregating Morphologies

On Mon, 13 May 2002 20:11:05 +0100, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:
> BrScA has vowel harmony, but no vowel disharmony.  The rule is basically
> very simple:
> - all lexical morphemes have the written shape CVC
> - all functional morphemes have the written shape C
>
> The vowel in CVC is stress (and probably longish); all unstressed vowels
> are unwritten and determined by vowel harmony. Also all spoken syllables
> have the form CV, therefore you can work where the unstressed vowels will
> appear in the (disyllabic) lexical morphemes and the functional morphemes;
> the unstressed vowels attached to them are determined by the lexical
> morpheme to which they are attached as suffixes/enclitics.
This reminds me of English prosody and stress, wherein every unstressed
syllable and most function words are reduced to their "weak" forms, i.e.,
each vowel is rendered as the schwa /@/, or sometimes short /i/, or
sometimes a short syllabic consonant such as [n_] appears.  Does this
bear any resemblance to your system?

I was just thinking that one could design a system with English-like
prosody, with all lexical words reduced to one syllable /CVC/ as you
have already done, but instead of functional morphemes determined by
vowel harmony, one could give these particles form /C@/, /CN/, and
maybe one or two others.  These syllabic nucleii are unlikely to be
confused even in rapid speech, and will at least double the particle
inventory. Suffixes could be of reversed form -/@C/ -/NC/, etc.
Morpheme segregation would be obvious by the vowel and stress system;
word segregation would be obvious by the consonant clusters.
The schwa of a suffix could even be dropped (that of a particle could
not be however).  As a example, if /N/ = syllabic nasal of some
sort and /@/ = schwa, /C/ = consonant and /V/ = full (stressed) vowel,
the the following utterance:

/C@CVCNCCVCC@CVCC@C@CVCC@C@CVCC@CCVC/

which, I think, can be unambiguously parsed:

/C@ CVC-NC CVC C@ CVC C@ C@ CVC C@ C@ CVC-C-@C CVC/

(This just *happens* to look like the silly English sentence:

"The ten-ant gave the book to the man wi' the cus-t-ard pies.")

Note that the next-to-last pseudo"suffix" contracts to a single
consonant.

BTW, I'm not sure if *any* of this is relavant to your project,
it's just a spur-of-the-monent idea I had :-)

Regards

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