Re: A Self-segregating morphology (was: Guinea pigs invited)

On 12/18/05, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> --- Larry Sulky <larrysulky@...> wrote:
>
> > Y'all are inventing Arabic, right?  :-)
> >
>
> hehe. I guess so , if you say so. But I really don't
> know anything about Arabic. :-) Nothing new under the
> sun, I guess.
>
> --gary
>
Haha; how'd you look up binyamin and not run across Arabic?  Anyway,
you were nearly there; I wish I hadn't used that word, and then you
could have invented Arabic ex nihilo.

Although, it looks like the wonders of root-and-pattern morphology
have distracted you from the ideas in your original post ;)... combine
the two and you've invented something really new under the sun: a
binyam system in which the vowels encode both meaning *and* the length
that a word is going to be.


On 12/18/05, Chris Peters <beta_leonis@...> wrote:
> >From: Gary Shannon Nothing new under the
> >sun, I guess.
> >
> How right you are.  For my on-again, off-again "Ricadh" project, I thought I
> was being so creative by "inventing", all on my own, a first-person plural
> exclusive pronoun:  a "We" that includes the speaker, but not the listener.
> Turns out that concept already exists in Quechua.
(And in a whole heap of other languages, too.)

This is one of the reasons why, unlike some (most?) people in the
field, I don't consider conlanging a frivolous activity.  It can be an
unmatched learning activity, done right.  (And it warms the cockles of
my heart to hear non-specialists discussing the intricacies of noun
incorporation and the like.)

My favorite moments are these -- when someone takes a sort of, oh,
"engineering" problem of "how will I express this" and comes up with,
on their own, a real-world solution.  Because then they don't just
know about the construction... they really understand the motivation
for it.

Like, take the following conlanging problem.  You're making up a
language that marks the agent and patient of a verb with case affixes,
but things are getting too long... you've got this thing for short
words, and it's taking too many syllables to say anything.  So you
start looking around for things you can get rid of, and you say,
"Hey...  For each noun root, I'll have the bare root be whatever case
that noun is most likely to be, and only use an affix when it gets the
less-likely case".

(go work it out if you want :)






So you go through and work out the details, and suddenly you've
"invented" animacy-split ergativity.  And now you know it a lot better
than someone who just learnt about it in class or read about it in a
book.  And what's more, you're probably not going to forget.  It's
like sitting there an proving a mathematical theorem rather than just
reading it in a book.  You only know *about* it until you've gone
through the process and derived it for yourself.

--
Patrick Littell

University of Pittsburgh
Fall 05 Office Hours: Friday, 1:00-2:00 by appointment
G17, Cathedral of Learning

CCBC
Voice Mail: ext 744
Fall 05 Office Hours: W 5:00-6:00, by appointment
Building 9, room 102

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