Re: Self-segregating Semitic Morphology

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 12:53 AM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
> Thought 1- building vocabulary based on consonantal roots allows for a
> large and powerful derivational system without having to resort to
> long strings of agglutinating affixes.
> Thought 2- self-segregating morphology is kinda cool.
>
> It would be neat if these two ideas could be combined. Unfortunately,
I see a couple of obvious ways to do it.

1. Use one set of consonants for your triliteral roots, and another
set of consonants that can occur in suffixes.  There are no prefixes.
Any time you encounter a consonant from the set of root consonants
following one or more suffix consonants and vowels, you've found the
beginning of a word, and any time you find a consonant from the set
of suffix consonants, you've found the beginning of a suffix.  If you find
a bunch of root consonants in a row separated only by vowels,
then the first, fourth, seventh etc. indicate the start of a new word.

2. Or allow prefixes too, and have a third set of consonants used
only in prefixes.

That limits your options on root vowel patterns; you couldn't have
vowels before the first root consonant, unless they were part
of a prefix.   You could have e.g.

CaCiCu
CCuCa
CiaCCi
CaCauC

etc., with suffixes of form CV+, but not root patterns like

aCCiC
uCiCaC

etc.

Suppose you have 20 consonants and 5 vowels, with
15 consonants allowed in roots and the other 5 in suffixes;
that gives you 3375 possible roots and 150 CV and CVV
suffixes.  Not sure offhand how to calculate the possible
root vowel patterns, but there should be scads of them too.


--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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