Re: Self-Segregating Morphologies

At 10:29 pm -0400 13/5/02, Mike S. wrote:
[snip]
>
>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?
Oh dear - have I fallen into the trap of imitating my L1?

I'd hoped the vowel harmony business did at least make it different;
indeed, it was coming across Turkish when I was somewhen around 13 or 14
that actually set of the vowel harmony idea (although it wasn't for any
form of BrSc then).

>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.
We discuss at some length a few years back whether to use [@] or the form
of vowel harmony I outlined.  After posting some computer generated text
with the two systems of pronunciation, the general consensus was that vowel
harmony was better.

[snip]
>
>/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/
It can indeed - but I do dislike all those schwas.

[snip]
>
>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 :-)
>
It once was   ;)

Ray.


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The median nature of language is an epistemological
commonplace.  So is the fact that every general
statement worth making about language invites a
counter-statement or antithesis.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
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