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

From:Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 7, 2005, 20:02
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