Re: Self-segregating Semitic Morphology

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
---BIG SNIP---
> One option became Exceedingly Obvious just after I woke up this
> morning- mark word boundaries with successive vowels. If you've
> already got the assumption that derivation patterns only use solitary
> vowels, then it's natural to think that two vowels in a row must
> belong to separate roots.
---SNIP---

>
> I'm not sure how I like the aesthetic of every word beginning and
> ending with a vowel, but it does work nicely. And it allows for the
> use of shorter roots mixed in to the language as well.
Have a look at Ilomi (earlier called Elomi). That would give you a
sense of what it might look like and how it might work. :-)

>
> This restricts the form of prefixes to VC{C}, and suffixes to {C}CV
> (although, if the clusters are allowed, you could have
> single-consonant infixes which hijack the already-present initial and
> terminal vowels as well). And it very nearly requires that you only
> use one or the other, but that is fixable by designating a consonant
> (or class of consonants) to mark the boundaries of an affix list (as
> discussed above); pick the clusters right, and that doesn't even
> require adding an extra syllable.
Again, Ilomi provides an illustration of this, on the boundary between
components of compound words.

---larry

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