Re: Systematic Word Relationships (Was: Arabic and BACK and a whole lot of other things.)

On 12/23/05, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> --- Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>
> > On 12/21/05, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> > > --- Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> >
> > > > Method, system, way of doing action:
> > > >
> > > > to fight -> martial art, fighting style
> > > > to program  -> programming methodology
> > > I added this as an enumeration since there are
> > more
> > > than one system or method.
> > OK.  I intended this as a way of deriving a
> > _general_ term for all such fighting styles,
> Ah, yes. I see. I'm thinking this goes in one
> directiong as a single relationship (karate->fight)
> but in the opposite direction it seems like an
> enumaeration to me. One could also say that "[French]"
> is a "style" of "language", so I'm not sure how to
Maybe "language" could be derived from
"to speak" with the same affix or vowel pattern
or what-have-you that derives "martial art"
from "to fight", "programming methodology"
from "to code", etc.  You could have a couple
of different verbs "to write" (physical)
& "to write" (literary), & derive words
for "script style" & "literary style" from them.

> > Each of these derivation patterns is of the form
> > ( specifier prefix ) + ( root ) + ( person suffix )
> > + (noun ending)
> > So:
> > land-o : country
> > land-an-o : citizen, inhabitant
> > sam-land-an-o : inhabitant of the same country
> > ali-land-an-o : inhabitant of another country
> Again, these look like compounds of multiple words
> rather than derrivations from a single word. I haven't
> started adressing those yet.
Yes; one could consider them circumfixes
in a sense, but that's probably not the most
linguistically sound way of describing them.
More aptly, they are compounding patterns
-- methods that form many useful compounds
from a certain pair of morphemes plus
a varying third morpheme.

Similarly, one could enumerate various
ways that compounding of two roots
might work:

1. a HEAD which has quality MODIFIER
(e.g. bluebird)

2. a HEAD originating from MODIFIER

3. an equal or roughly equal mixture of
HEAD and MODIFIER materials

4. mostly HEAD with a little MODIFIER mixed in
(e.g. carbon-iron => steel, salt-water => saline)

5. a HEAD made of MODIFIER material

etc......  An engelang might have a large
set of intra-word conjunctions that
disambiguate the way a compound word's
modifier-morpheme modifies its head
(and, using Tom Chappell's idea, maybe
two allomorphs each for those conjunctions,
one high-precedence and one
low-precedence, for use in compounds
of three or more morphemes).

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field