Re: Euphonic phonology (Was: 'Nor' in the World's Languages)

Hallo!

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 16:19:30 -0600, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> I think that a strict segregation of morphology and phonology is
> probably a mistake in lg creation, whatever your analytical
> predilections are.
Yes.

>       For me, most of the interest in morphology is in
> its interaction with phonological forms. Stuff like ablaut, mutation,
> root-and-pattern inflection, and reduplication depend heavily on the
> phonological makeup of the language. If you have a morphology you like
> (that is, you make distinctions among categories you think are
> interesting and useful) look at making the morphology more dependent
> on the sound structure of words--try out some ablaut, mutation, etc to
> liven up both the phonology and morphology.
Seconded.  The morphology makes use of phonological processes like the ones
you mentioned.  For instance, the way vowel features autosegmentally attach
to morphemes in Old Albic strongly influences the phonemic shapes of the
morphemes in question, e.g. if a morpheme is bisyllabic, both vowels have the
same quality, and there are syllabic morphemes without vowel features attached
which borrow their vowel features from neighbouring morphemes, thus leading to
vowel harmony.  I once changed all the case endings because I realized that
the old endings didn't really match up with the language's phonology.

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