Re: Arabic and BACK TO Self-segregating morphology

--- Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:

> On 12/20/05, Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
> wrote:
> > On 12/20/05, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
> wrote:
<snip>

This is a really interesting problem, from the
theoretical viewpoint. But as a practical matter, I
wouldn't want any conlang of mine to have words as
long as "kainalijaupalitaosa" anyway, so I doubt I
could find any real-world use for anything more than
the most rudamentary system of compounding. In the
Brown Corpus, the longest word by syllable count is
"individual" at five syllables, and even many of the
ten-letter words in that corpus have only 2 or 3
syllables:
  "throughout", "commission", "importance",
"everything".

So it appears than any word beyond 5 or maybe 6
syllables would (or perhaps "should") be extremely
rare in daily conversation, regardless of the
language. (excluding agglutinative languages of
course, but they're just bizzare anyway ;-)

--gary

Replies