Re: How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")

On 2/23/07, Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> wrote:

>.........When I cared about Esperanto and had some
> working knowledge of it I used to amuse myself by
> subjecting it to polysyntheis, which is quite possible and
> at least theoretically licit according to the grammar, at
> least in the sense that Esperanto already is heavily
> agglutinating and quite lenient when it comes to forming
> multipart compounds and stacking affixes, e.g. the entirely
> cromulent exchange:
>
> : _Kiel paskas?_
> : Ki-el pask-as
> : WH-MANNER easter-PRESENT
> : 'How do celebrate Easter?'
I would read "Kiel paskas?" as meaning "How is Easter going/happening?";
for "How do you/how does one celebrate Easter?", I would say
"Kiel oni paskumas?" / "Kiel oni paskumu?"

> : _Italuje._
> : Ital-uj-e
> : Italy-COUNTRY-ADV
> : 'in the Italian way'
Or more simply "itale", without the -uj- suffix.

> Admittedly it was hard to incorporate such things as
> pronouns or adverbial, adjectival, nominal or case endings
> without the result merely looking like I had just omittide
> inter-word spaces, but I reasoned those morphemes could just
> be skipped.
It's licit and not uncommon to include the case marker in
the nominal part of a Obj-V type of compound -- e.g.
"si-n-mort-ig-ant-o", suicidal person.  But it's probably more
common to leave the -n- out, e.g. "sang-soif-a" (bloodthirsty)
rather than "sang-o-n-soif-a".  I don't think I've ever seen
compounds with a plural marker in the prefixed nominal
object, though.

>In theory _Italujpaskanto_ is a cromulent word
> for 'someone who is celebrating Easter the Italian way' or
> 'in Italy', so I'd just turn it into a verb
> _Italujpaskantas_. Admittedly the omission of a number of
I would say "italpaskumanto"; "paski" seems like it should
be an impersonal verb for "It's Easter/Easter celebrations
are happening", while "to celebrate Easter" would be
"paskumi".

> markers creates ambiguity, so it must be regarded as a
> langvuage game rather than as an alternative grammatically
> correct form of expression, but the tendency is there.
With Esperanto it's maybe not so easy to draw the line between
language game and standard grammatical usage as with
some other languages.  And some usages that started out
as language-game jokes or poetic license have become common
in everyday speech, e.g. use of affixes as stand-alone words,
and verbization of nouns.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry