Twenty-word language challenge (was Re: A Tiny Attempt at Conlanging [was: Re: Tiny lexicon languages]

On 16 Jun 99, at 19:13, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Joe Mondello wrote:
> > 1. can a word have multiple stresses/tones and still be considered one=
 word
> > in an isolationg system.  for example, are =E9po and ep=F3 considered =
one word?
>
> Depends on the structure of the language.  Those could be two words, or
> they could be other forms of one word.  For instance, plural might be
> indicated by moving the stress.
>
> > 2.  can a word's phonemes be moved around, e.g.  pako and kapo and pok=
a and
> > kopa.  can these be considered one word if they mean ' a pako', 'pakos=
',
> > 'pako's' and 'pako-accusative'
>
> Hmm, I don't think that would be very naturalistic.  Of course, a
> 20-word language isn't naturalistic to begin with!  :-)  I suppose you
> could do that.
That could be a nifty form of derivation, but I don't think it fits the
spirit of the challenge.  The words or morphemes are supposed to
be invariant; they might vary their phonemic form by context but
they shouldn't change their meaning or grammatical role by
changing their stress, or anything like that.


Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/gzb/gzb.htm
*gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box goq.