Re: Self-Segregating Morphologies

En réponse à "Mike S." <mcslason@...>:

> Another thing that can be done with such closed-class affix morphemes,
> is to give them some syntactical meaning, such as number, gender,
> tense, or whatever one wishes the language to encode, so that they
> do more than just parse the syntax.
>
Well, indeed they do in Notya. They are not only parsers (in fact, this feature
is only secondary and came by itself, I never had thought of it before :)) )
but grammatical markers, indicating basically two things:
- internally, whether the meaning of the root is to be taken as a state or a
process,
- externally, what is its relationship with the following word, or if it
doesn't have a relationship with it.

I know, this looks pretty abstract, but that's what you get when you try to
make a language that really doesn't have the distinction between verbs and
nouns, or any other parts of speech, not even practically :)) .

> I have given only a little consideration to using pitch, tone, stress
> and/or
> prosody for the purpose of self-segregation or syntax.  I am tempted
> to try to use them somehow; after all, every language has to have
> them,
> so why not regularize them and make them productive?  I hesitate for
> a couple reasons;  right now I think it's best to keep the phonology
> relatively simple.  It'll always be possible to complexify later.
>
You could use a simple stress pattern, or some pitch-accent. They stay simple
enough compared to contour tones :)) .

>
> Thanks for the input.
>
You're welcome.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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