Re: Terkunan: rules for deriving nouns, verbs, adjectives

Hallo!

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:33:05 -0600, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> On 10/30/07, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
> >
> > The GMP *should not* distinguish between morphological endings and
> > normal stem ends (where they are word-final), because real sound
> > changes *do not make such distinctions*.  You are trying to simulate
> > something that *just doesn't happen* in natlangs.  If a final -m
> > goes away, for instance, it does so no matter what kind of morpheme
> > it is part of.
>
> It is not true that sound changes do not take morphological boundaries
> into account. [Examples]
>
> So it seems that morphological information is crucial to understanding
> this change, and your statement that "sound changes don't care the
> least of the morphological structure
> of the word" is not true, or is at best overstated.
True, it is an overstatement - the Neogrammarian hypothesis of "blind,
exceptionless sound change" at least has to be qualified.  (There are
of course theoretical problems with it, anyway.  Speech sounds are
merely acoustic wave packets and no living beings who can act out
of themselves - everything that happens in a language happens in
the minds, mouths and ears of its speakers.)  Surely, sound changes
*do* interact with morphological processes - in my "eroded building"
model, eroded stones are sometimes replaced before they cause further
damage.

Yet, Henrik's derivations look rather unnatural to me.  But after all,
it is *his* conlang, and I don't really "want him to do" anything
particular.  After all, as I once said in another thread, making
your own conlang is a much more laudable endeavour than grooming
someone else's conlang for fleas!

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