Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> R A Brown <ray@...> writes:
[snip]
>>that affixes need to be _precisely_ defined. I cannot have vaguely
>>defined concepts like "association", "special", "general" which then in
>>practice overlap one another in quite unpredictable ways. And if there
>>to be antonym & complement affixes, these need to be clearly defined and
>>applied strictly & consistently.
>
>
> Ok. In West-Greenlandic, my favourite cited example is the school,
> the 'learning-place'. It is a derivation of 'learn' + 'place'. The
> 'place' derivation is clearly defined, much more so than 'association'
> and the other things you list. Would you say that the interpretation
> of 'learning-place' as 'school' is an idiom?
No - since the meaning can reasonably be deduced from the two elements.
>It is obviously a specialisation.
In a way - but 'school' is surely the most general "learning place".
> I understand that you will not have derivation of this kind, since
> words will get too long, but I'm simply interested in whether you'd
> call this idiomatic derivation.
What I would call 'idiomatic derivation' are things like "evue":
e- v- u- e
be-ASSOCIATION-one-AUGMENT = "corporation"
>
>>As to compounding of lexical morphemes, I have no problem with that
>>per_se, but I do not want to have idiomatic compounding.
>
>
> Ok, so adhoc/ambiguity is ok, but idiomatic is not?
It certainly is not. I do not know why you assume it is.
>>...
>>Something totally different? I don't know what that would be.
>
>
> I just thought you might have come up with some other concept.
> Conlangers often do innovative stuff :-))
Maybe it's the lack of 'innovativeness' that has caused Piashi to be so
long in the making :=(
>
> Lexicon is hard for me, too. Not so much due to it consisting of
> many, many single entries, but more so to find the right design, the
> system behind all those lexicon entries. Satisfaction is hard to
> achieve here...
It is indeed!
--
Ray
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