Re: Self-segregating Semitic Morphology

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> 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.
OK, makes sense. But that could be fixed by disallowing final vowels
as well as by disallowing initials. That would be fairly unusual,
though; I don't know of any languages that have initial vowels but not
finals.

-l.