Re: Auto-Segmenting Engelang (was REQUEST: Engelang?)

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005 23:59:07 -0500, Damian Yerrick <tepples@...>
wrote:

>> What is suffix-coding?
>
>Suffix-coding is prefix-coding of the reversal of an utterance.
I'm sorry, but what does that mean?

>> I like this one and had thought of it before.  It seems that I prefer
>> word-initial stress to word-final.
>
>A *lot* of languages do this.  For example, Finnish puts stress
>on the Starrt of each word, and so does Toki Pona.  Welsh seems
>to put it on the penult, sort of a suffix-coding variant.
>
>> Interesting.  That would be hard for me personally to speak, though - I
>> can't really tell between more than two tones ("high" and "low"). :P
>
>Patrick Littell described a code using the vowels that reminded
>me of the Semitic paradigm, but I'll take an educated guess that
>its autosegmenting properties would fall apart rawther quickly
>through sound change, even with analogy to boost it.
>
>Still, you still implement a prefix code for segmentation using
>other attributes such as voicing, aspiration, vowel length,
>consonant gemination etc. in place of or in addition to tone.
>Multiple redundant features might not fall victim to sound change
>as quickly, but they might reduce the size of the lexicon that you
>can achieve at a given maximum word length.
>
>> Something I want to do with this engelang thing is have no independent
>> pronouns.  Instead there will be affixes that indicate the pronouns and
>> can attach to any word.  However, I'm sure that certain words that are
>> inflected that way will be used for emphasis (such as "yourself" etc).
>
>So how would it handle the following situation?
>
>"Who wants to go get ice cream?"
>"Meeee!!!"
Probably the form for "myself" would be used.  Morphologically, it would be
of the form "self-my".

- Rob