Re: Self-segregating Semitic Morphology

2008/9/8 Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...>
>
> 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,
> most self-segregating morphology schemes are based on limiting the
> shapes of syllables that are allowed in certain positions, which seems
> directly contradictory to the idea of a derivational system that's
> based on changing syllable shapes around a consonantal root.
Looking up self-segregating morphology on Conlang Wikia, it looks like
the accepted definition is that morpheme or word boundaries should be
immediately obvious without full knowledge of the lexicon.

In a semitic style language, the morphemes of a word aren't combined
in sequence, so they don't have boundaries as such. You may be
thinking that you need to make self-segregating _syllables_, but I
don't think that serves any purpose in this context. You will probably
have to come up with another definition of self-segregating to be able
to play.

> Any ideas on how to get around that? Or is it inevitable that trying
> to implement self-segregating morphology will severely restrict how
> much of the total pattern space you can use in a consonantal root
> system?
As I see it, morpheme self-segregation in the usual sense is a perfect
fit to an agglutinating language -- it makes the division of a word
into morphemes absolutely unambiguous.

So your analogous notion would be the property that any given surface
word is derived from its root in one single, obvious way. That is, it
must always be immediately obvious exactly what the root is and what
patterns were applied to get the form. Of course that will restrict
the types of patterns you can create, but there's no inherent reason
why the 'result space' shouldn't be populated as densely as you like.

And if you want self-segregating phonological words, you're actually
better off than with sequential morphemes. Self-segregation (or
self-synchronization in general coding theory) needs redundancy, which
is the same as 'populating the pattern space sparsely'. And since your
words are known to be built on tri-consonantal roots, marking your
word boundaries will only need about the same redundancy per word that
syllable-based schemes do per syllable, so your pattern space can be
more densely populated.

--
Lars