franc,ois chauvet:
> On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Ray Brown skribis :
> >Reginald Dutton endowed his Speedwords with only 511 morphemes - 491
> >'radicals' and 20 'particles'. He claimed:
> "It is readily deducible that the total obtainable by combining every
> >radical and its derivates with every other would be 491 x 20 x 490 x 20;
that is
> >millions of words, and all without additional memory effort once the few
> >fundamental have been learnt."
> >
> >In practice this leads to so many idiomatic compounds that additional
> >memory is most certainly needed. Better a new morpheme than an arbitrary
> >idiomatic compounding.
> >
> >Jeffrey Henning's Dublex claims to need only some 400 (IIRC) basic
> >morphemes - but from what I've seen of it, it has to resort to some
kludgey and
> >potentially ambiguous compounding.Indeed, I cannot see how this can be
avoided if >vocabulary is so restricted.
>
> My approach is to use a limited set of "elementary morphemes", in the
sense of
> "elementary particles". Then the "real" morphemes are built by composition
and
> derivation, and the initial morphemes are then buried into the
incounscious
> reptilian memory of the proto-conlang. Who cares that the word "origin"
includes
> the proto-IE root "or" (to arise, to spring up)? That's the kind of thing
I'm
> trying to re-create.
Rick Harrison's very elegant creation Katanda (now called something else,
but I
forget what) used a similar but more systematic approach, whereby roots are
formed out of meaningful root-forming morphemes that serve to provide clues
about the root's meaning.
--And.