Re: Linguistic knowledge and conlanging (was Explaining linguistic...)

Andreas Johansson said:
> Quoting "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>:
>
>> Personal note: My beef has usually been with conlangers who insist that
>> they are operating well inside of natlang evolutionary space,
>> notwithstanding any amount of evidence to the contrary (e.g. deep center
>> embedding, phonological conditioning of open-class suppletive
>> allomorphy,
>> pure ergativity, etc.). I'm becoming more mellow with age, however, and
>> now almost always leave everybody alone. :)
>
> What's phonological embedding of open-class suppletive allomorphy?
You meant "conditioning", not "embedding".

Suppletive affixes are sometimes phonologically conditioned in natlangs.
In Seri (Hokan), for example, there are two allomorphs for the passive
morpheme: |ah| and |p|. The |ah| form occurs before consonants, while the
|p| form occurs before vowels. (Actually, that's slightly oversimplified,
but you get the picture.)

I've seen this kind of thing in Hungarian, but I can't remember the
details. (The Seri example was from a textbook I could easily put my hands
on...)

Conventional wisdom among typologists is that while suppletive _affixes_
are often conditioned phonologically (as in Seri and Hungarian), the same
thing doesn't happen with _roots_. I said "open-class" instead of "root"
because that's what I think is really behind this typological pattern.
(I've seen closed-class roots that I thought were best described in terms
of phonologically conditioned suppletion. I also think there's a good
neurocognitive reason for the resistance of open-class morphemes against
this kind of conditioned suppletion, but that's a topic for a different
venue -- as is this...)


-- Mark