Re: Self-segregating morphology again - in simpler terms, with list of methods

On 4/17/06, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Apr 2006 12:58:05 -0400, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
> wrote:
> [snip]
> >Maybe it would make sense to collect a list of methods
> >for self-segregation.
>
> I'd like that; I second the motion.
Here's another:

6. All morphemes begin and end with a consonant and
have no consonant clusters within them.  A consonant
cluster marks a morpheme boundary.
(Vorlin used this to some extent, but not, I think,
consistently enough to be perfectly self-segregating
-- content morphemes were all CVC, CVCVC, etc but
particles, prefixes  and suffixes were CV or VC and I
don't recall that it had a way to distinguish them
from the content roots they adjoined.)
Or maybe one vowel is reserved for use as a
morpheme boundary marker, so there are no
consonant clusters.

> >[snip]
> >... perhaps the simplest such rule: one set
> >of phonemes (the fricatives, plosives and affricates)
> >are the beginning set, and another set (the vowels,
> >nasals, liquids and semivowels) are the following set.
> >A morpheme consists of one or more phonemes from
> >the beginning set, followed by one or more phonemes
> >from the following set.
>
> The rule; "one set of phonemes is the final set, and another set is the
> preceding set" would work also.
I'm not sure what distinction you're making.  It sounds
like alternate terms to describe the same rule, not
a different rule.

> Essentially, pick out a set that can only occur at a boundary; then, either
> the boundary is always just before any member of that set, or the boundary
> is always just after any member of that set.
This is slightly different, then.  Tceqli's rule allow
*one or more* from one set followed by one or more
from the other set.  You seem to propose
*exactly one* from one set followed by one or more from
the other, or one or more from the first followed
by *exactly one* from the second.

For Tceqli, the boundary is always where a member of the
following set is followed by a member of the initial set.

On 4/17/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:

> My conlang, Livagian, has unambiguous syntax parsed
> incrementally with no lookahead, and it cuts the
> Gordian knot of self-segrating morphology by extending
> the input to the syntactic parser to the level of the
> syllable (or potentially the segment). As each syllable
> is read in, the syllable is looked up in the lexicogrammar,
........
> The lexicon necessarily contains instructions for how to
> deal with every string of syllables.
>
> The upshot is that a sentence can't necessarily be parsed
> into words or morphemes on the basis of its phonological
> form alone, but a sentence can be fully parsed on the
> basis of its phonological form and the lexicogrammar,
> without there being a need for self-segregating morphology
> or for the complexities or constraints on morpheme shapes
> that self-segregation schemes impose.
Let me make sure I understand.  You don't constrain
the shapes of the individual morphemes so that they're
inherently self-segregating -- but it seems you must
constrain them relative to each  other so that no morpheme
looks like a prefix or suffix of another morpheme.
So e.g., if there were a monosyllabic word "vek",
there couldn't be any two or more syllable word that
starts with "vek", but there's no reason /v/ or /e/ shouldn't
occur in the middle or end of any word.

I'm thinking that I might probably impose a constraint
like this on my next conlang over and above a
self-segregation rule -- or perhaps instead of such.
Self-segregating morphology is probably of benefit
primarily to beginning learners of a language, whose
vocabulary is still small.  But your rule would be
helpful to more experienced speakers when
looking up the occasional unknown word.  They
would not encounter words that look like they might
be a compound of one word they already know
and another word they don't know, which turn out
to be irreducible roots instead (this occasionally
happens to me in Esperanto).

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm

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