Re: Self-segregating Semitic Morphology

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>> 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.
> Mm... I'm not seeing why.
I was thinking that, with some vowel patterns beginning with
vowels before the first root consonant, and some ending with
vowels after the last root consonant, but neither of those being
ubiquitous (as in your tentative scheme outlined later on,
or in Larry's Ilomi), then there would sometimes be ambiguity
about whether a vowel belongs to the previous word
or the next.  You could patch that by allowing only a
certain subset of vowels before the first root consonant,
and another subset after the last root consonant.  There
are probably other ways to get around it, too.  For instance,
you might use tone, stress, nasalization, or lengthening
on the first (or last) vowel of a word to distinguish it from
the non-first (or nonfinal) vowels.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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