Re: basic morphemes of a loglang

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003 13:15:03 +0100, fr-chauvet <fr-chauvet@...>
wrote:

>On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 20:33:56 -0500, Robert Jung > wrote:
>Almost everybody seems to agree that about 1000 basic morphemes are needed (and
>enough). The examples of Basic English (ca. 800 words), Esperanto and
>Volapük (no idea of word count, but probably slightly over 1000) confirm
>this. The 881 "essential characters" of Japanese also go that way, while not
>being European-biased.
Basic English only gets by with so few words because of its reliance on
English idioms (which won't necessarily make sense to someone who doesn't
know English), and allowing the use of "international" words like "radio"
and "coffee", which aren't in the basic list. The "Universala Vortaro" of
Esperanto seems to have about 2,600 roots (anyone know the exact number?),
but many of these are little-used words like _cinabro_ "cinnabar" or
_marcipano_ "marzipan", which could be paraphrased as "mercury ore" and
"almond paste". The 881 "essential" Japanese characters would be a good
place to start, but they don't include a number of common Japanese words
written with kana.

Rather than arbitrarily trying to limit the number of basic roots, it might
be better to allow room for growth. When I was designing the phonology for
Tilya, I allowed for the possibility of over 24,000 roots, even though I
never expected to need more than a fraction of the possible roots.

>As a loglan, Lojban has about 1400 root words, but allows some redundancy. This
>is unavoidable, unless you accept to be absurdly analytic. E.g., Lojban has
>all 16 logical connectors, while it is well known that only one (e.g. NOR)
>suffices. What about, "neither (neither my sister nor herself) nor (neither
>me nor myself)", meaning "my sister and I"? :-)))
If you want to go that route, why not use a binary number system in place
of decimal? You wouldn't need any of the words for "two" through "nine",
only "one" and "zero". But no one can easily deal with numbers written in
binary; even computer programmers use hexadecimal (or octal) as a more
easily readable representation of binary numbers.

>Also, IMHO, the semantic role of derivations is often underestimated. Consider
>Arabic, with about 400 derivation schemes applied to a quite limited set of
>three-consonant roots. Of course, this introduces bias. It is not obvious to
>me that a tree is "something that grows" (kreskajho in Esperanto, IIRC),
>although it is so in many conlangs; why not focus on "bearing fruits",
>probably more useful in real life?
Not all trees bear fruit, and not all fruits come from a tree; "woody
plant" would be better (unless the distinction between "tree" and "bush" is
significant). In Esperanto a tree is just "arbo".

>I profit being here to ask for experienced advice on a few points:
>(1) How to get enough roots, while keeping a simple syllabic structure? (this is
>of course related to the above). I wish to keep basic roots monosyllabic, in
>order to have "final" words with typically two or three syllables. But, to
>keep things pronunceable, I restrict things to VC, CVC, CCVC or CVCC (some CC
>pairs are of course forbidden). With 3 vowels and 11 consonants (I have good
>reasons to do that), it is a bit short, and all possible syllables quickly
>get used up. Some suggestions?
With a limited number of possible syllables, you'll probably end up having
to reuse them in a context-sensitive fashion in many ways. You could give
one meaning to a syllable when used in isolation, and a different meaning
when used as part of a compound. The first syllable of a word could be a
highly abstract "classifier" that determines the interpretation of
following syllables. Say for instance that "an" refers to animals and
"plan" to plants; "an-spi" could be a spider and "plan-spi" could be
spinach. So you'd have two different roots with the same pronunciation
"spi", but the context always makes it clear which one is intended.

Keep in mind that if you allow CCVC and CVCC roots, if you want to combine
them you could end up with a four-consonant cluster in the middle, or end
up having to add a vowel between them.

Most languages that rely heavily on monosyllabic roots have more complex
phonology (English is a good example), or increase the number of possible
syllables by the use of tones (such as Chinese). If you want a simple
phonology, you might want to allow two- or three-syllable roots for the
less commonly used morphemes.

Tilya allows for 24,675 CVCC roots (not counting the final vowel) by having
21 initial consonants, 5 vowels, and 235 permissible consonant clusters.
Languages with as few as 11 consonants tend to have basic roots longer than
one syllable. Hawaiian (with 8 consonants, 5 vowels, and phonemic vowel
length) has roots of typically two or three syllables. My language Kisuna
(with 3 consonants and 3 vowels) most frequently has 3- and 4-syllable
roots.

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