Arabic and BACK TO Self-segregating morphology

--- Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> wrote:

<snip>

> All Semitic languages to the best of my knowledge,
> use a triconsonantal with
> two vowels to express basic verbal ideas, adding
> complexity and additional
> consonants and vowels to express more complex ideas.
My plan was for three consonants, each followed by a
vowel or dipthong (possibly modified by "-n"), and an
optional initial vowel or dipthong. Thus: "pkt" could
be no shorter than "pokatu" nor longer than
"ainpuinkiantiun" (although in practice none would
really be THAT long). But in every case the vowels
would be fully written out.

There would be no inflections, and any change of vowel
would mean a change in the meaning, not in case,
tense, plurality, etc. Those would be marked by
particles.

The vowel changes would be uniform and and consistent.
Thus if -a-i-a was the primary noun and a-a-in-a was
the negative of the primary noun the with "nlj" we
have "nalija" = knowledge and "analinja" = ignorance;
with "wlt" we have "walita" = wealth and "awalinta" =
poverty. Thus knowing the roots and patterns one can
coin a new word or recognize a word not encountered
before. So if we know that "sakisa" is success then
even if we have never seen the word "asakinsa" we
would know what it meant. And we would also know how
to form "to succeed", "successful", successfully",
"successful-person", "to fail", "unsuccessful",  etc.

Also, since every base word is three consonants long
when we encountered a four-consonant word we would
know that a prefix or suffix had been added, and by
the vowel patterns we would know which. And likewise,
five-consonant and longer words would, by their vowel
patterns be easily broken down into their roots and
affixes according to vowel patterns, thus retaining
the self-segregating property.

--gary

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