Re: Tiki vocabulary

From: "Jim Henry" <jimhenry1973@...>
Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2006 4:27 AM

> Neither Volapük nor Esperanto nor, as far as I know, any
> other early auxlang had self-segregating morphology; all
> of them had problems like the one you describe to some
> extent (it was pretty bad in the original Volapük; Arie
> de Jong's 1931 revision fixed some specific ambiguities
> but didn't solve the underlying problem).
I came across the same problem in Ayeri and have thought
about maybe making changes to the one or the other affix,
but eventually decided against it. Note that Ayeri is in no
way intended to be an auxlang: Natlangs also have
ambiguities, but nobody cares about them except there isn't
any context given. So at least for conlangs, I see no reason
why they shouldn't allow the one or the other ambiguity. I
also see no problem for auxlangs in this regard, except of
course you want to have an engelang-type auxlang. I wonder,
though, how agglutinating/fusional languages deal with
potentially ambiguous compounds of affixes and stems. In
Ayeri, it's easy to have words that initially look like
verbs, but that are no verbs due to not taking any
necessary parts of a verb as suffixes like person and case
agreement. Is that enough already? I think so. I might have
a disambiguating look again at conditional/consequencial
sentences. Also, verb stems should neither begin with the
time prefixes nor end in -asa and -ong, and nouns by
preference should not in any of the case endings as well ...
it's really a bit messy here. On the other hand I don't
like to go back and change the grammar now that I have
already translated lots of things.

I conclude that in my humble opinion minor ambiguities
should be permissible if you don't go for an engelang.
Since natlangs aren't always 100% clear, conlangs don't
need to be either. Some ambiguity only adds to naturalism
I think. Anyway, natlangs usually find ways to
disambiguate more sensible contexts by establishing an
alternative construction expressing the same as far as
I know.

Carsten

--
"Miranayam kepauarà naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Pinena, Yangtim 8, 2315, ea 04:32:36 pd

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