Re: "Transferral" verb form in LC-01

David Peterson writes:
 > In a message dated 06/25/02 2:27:00 PM, butsuri@BTOPENWORLD.COM writes:
 >
 > << So, as far as practical conlanging goes, I'm not interested in
 > achieving that goal.  I'm just deriving in order to avoid wasting
 > roots (current rules allow only 2630 roots, although these are due for
 > renovation) and to make the language as transparently predictable as
 > possible. >>
 >
 >     That few?  How many consonants do you have?  In my triconsonantal root
 > language, I don't have to worry, because I have (I think) forty consonants,
 > which allows for 64,000 roots, which would allow me to have, you know, twenty
 > different words for "to carry", if I wished, and not worry at all about
 > economy.  Or do you have a fixed phonemic inventory?  (I was trying to go
 > backwards, and I came up with 13-14 consonants?)  What I mean is, did you
 > specifically want there to be fewer roots or a small phonemic inventory?
 >

Well, I basically used all the consonants I could pronounce, but there
are phonotactic considerations.  A lot of it concerns what happens in
compounds, or in various inflectional forms that I haven't designed
yet.  To be more specific,

First of all there are about 3 consonants which aren't included in the
calculation, because I never decided on the best way to handle them.
So in reality there are more roots possible no matter how I do it,
unless I cut those out entirely for use in roots (which I might).

Secondly, in compounds there are various assimilational effects.  To
prevent this from becoming ambiguous, all final stops are voiced and
all final fricatives are unvoiced, and there is only one permitted
final nasal /N/.

Finally, there's a rule that no two roots may differ only in the
voicing of a single consonant, to reduce the possibility of mishearing
(or ambiguity if the first is assimilated).  As the voicing of the
third is fixed anyway, this means that for every pair of place/manner
configurations in the first two consonants, you get 2 possibilities
rather than four.

Plus there aren't any affricates treated as seperate consonants
(because they're hard to distinguish from a homorganic stop-fricitive
cluster, which would interfere with my attempts to make the morphology
self-segregating) and semivowels aren't used in the roots, because
they're used only in the infixes, and maybe to distinguish non-root
words (particles).

But as I said, a good deal of this is likely to change somewhat, and
hopefully the number of permitted roots will increase.  For one thing,
I think I can reliably pronounce /G/ now, which I couldn't when I
started.

[Actually, all other things being equal I would prefer a smaller
phonological inventory, but with these rules it takes a fairly large
one to get a usable number of roots.]

Incidentally, there are phonotactic restrictions on the triliteral
roots of Semitic languages.  The first and second consonants cannot be
members of the same phonetic series (according to Campbell).
Consequently, while there are over 3000 possible roots in Arabic,
there aren't 28^3 (21952).