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

"Rob Haden" <magwich78@...> wrote:
> Patrick Littell <puchitao@...> wrote:
> >All of the following schemes lead to self-segmentation
[...]
> >1.) Monosyllablism. Naturalistic *and* self-segmenting.
> >2.) Given monosyllabic roots, monosyllabic prefixes are kosher so long as
> >no prefix is homophonous with a root. (Suffixes would be okay by suffix-
> >coding, I figure.)
>
> What is suffix-coding?
Suffix-coding is prefix-coding of the reversal of an utterance.

> >3.) Each word is stressed on the final syllable. (First works, too.)
> >Pitch, vowel length -- anything like that would work.
>
> 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.

> >4.) There is an inventory of tone patterns a word/morpheme may take, a la
> >Yoruba, but no tone pattern is a prefix of any other.
[...]
> 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!!!"

--
Damian