Re: Self-Segregating Morphologies

On Tue, 14 May 2002 04:36:45 +0100, And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:

>Mike S:
>>
>> Are there any systems out there greatly different from the four that
>> I have mentioned?
>
>Yes. Let me first mention my preferred varisnt on the above sorts of
>system:
>* C alternates with V or (@) = elidable schwa.
>* word boundary # is present iff in the environment V#CV or VCV#.
I am afraid I don't quite grasp this description... could you elaborate a
bit?

>As for a gretly different system, I offer that of Livagian.
Is this language on the web?  My websearch was fruitless.

>> Is it important to self-segregate the morpheme level, or is word-
>> level self-segregation sufficient?
>
>It depends. If the morphology is compositional, productive and
>regular, then self-segregating morphemes are necessary. Otherwise,
>they're not.
I was briefly mulling a system in which roots would, through a regularized
process, produce "rafsi" of sorts, one for the prefix, and one for a
suffix.  Sort of like forming "conguage" from CONstructed lanGUAGE"
These pseudo-rafsi would not themselves be distinct, but they
would produce distinct new roots which would be assigned a precise
dictionary definition.  Moreover, compounds themselves could decompose
and form new compounds rather than agglutinate.  A rationalized acronym
system was another idea I had.  Acronyms are a very terse and productive
derivational device in English, though obviously handicapped by the fact
that reversing the composition process is not possible. I must admit
I grow less fond of these ideas the more I think about them though.

>But as I've argued before, I think that deviating from isolatingness
>-- i.e. introducing a distinction between words and morphemes --
>adds much complexity to the grammar, and this addition needs to be
>justified in some way conceptually (e.g. by making all closed-class
>morphemes bound affixes).
>
>> Should self-segregation be based on semantics or on phonological
>> shape alone? (e.g., should prefix morphemes need to be memorized, or
>> should such semantics be identifiable from morpheme shape?)
>
>I think this comes down to a difference of degree rather than of
>kind: if you don't have homophonous morphemes, then it's just a
>matter of how specific the phonological rules for self-segmentation
>are.
>
>> How much importance do conlangers in general place on self-
>> segregation?  For those of you who have build self-segregating
>> morphologies into your conlangs, what sort of appraoch did you take,
>> and why?
>
>The point of having self-segmentation is as a necessary condition
>for true grammatical nonambiguity. It's a slightly quixotic goal,
>though, in that the ambiguities that actually do beset real
>language use hardly ever involve misparsed segmentation, though it
>must be conceded that in speech prosody helps segmentation, while
>in writing the presence of spaces does.
>
>> What system do you think is best and why?
>
>It very much depends on what the other goals of the conlang are,
>because different schemes impact differently on concision, on
>flexbility of shape, and so on. Of the schemes you listed, I
>like Katanda's the most. If I were to redesign Loglan/Lojban
>(which is what Ceqli is doing), I would use the V#CV, VCV#,
>C(@)C scheme I outlined above.
>
>--And.
A lot of food for thought here. Appreciated.

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