Re: building from primitives (was Re: Langauge Constets)

Hallo!

On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:00:36 +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Jörg Rhiemeier writes:
> > On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:06:24 +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> >
> >> Hi!
> >>
> >> Jörg Rhiemeier writes:
> >> > The problem I see with such schemes is that the world is way too
> >> > complex.  How do you say 'spaghetti' or 'kimono', or 'quantum
> >> > chromodynamics' or 'morphosyntactic aligment', in an oligosynthetic
> >> > conlang?
> >>
> >> Easily done: you lexicalise a compound or derivation (with a
> >> specilised or even slightly adjusted meaning). ...
> >> further shorted long words.
> >
> > Sure, but this tends to produce clumsy circumlocutions - unless your
> > morphemes are *very* short, you are likely to end up with very long
> > words.  And with compounds, you easily run into the "black bird vs.
> > blackbird" sort of problems.
>
> Hmm, not necessarily: a) your language may use short compounds that
> really need the lexicalisation to be fully understood (like
> 'white-collar'),
Yes; many compounds are much shorter than the definition of the word.
A blackbird is not simply a black bird; it is a specific species of
bird which, among other features, is typically black - but there
are of course plenty of black birds that aren't blackbirds, and an
albino blackbird would still be a blackbird but not a black bird.

>       b) the language may distinguish compound and phrase:
> English often uses stress for that, German has different forms:
> 'Jungfrau' vs. 'junge Frau'.
Sure.  A compound is a word, a phrase is a phrase.  Compounds thus
at least have a different prosody, if not a different morphology
and/or syntax.

> > ... Yet, things such
> > as 'desoxyribonucleic acid' are difficult to circumscribe this way,
> > I think, and native-material compound words probably end up being
> > very, very long.
>
> Could be expected, yes, but is not necessary (see above, and consider
> portemanteaus).  Japanese has the nice two+two-mora compounds:
> karaoke, for example.  Yet I'd definitely have to think a while to
> come up with something for DNA in Toki Pona. :-)
Yes.  That language is very miserly on roots - so you quickly get
into compounds with three, four or more members.

> > ...  My point was that borrowing is often much more convenient than
> > verbose circumscriptions,
>
> Definitely.  Yet compounding is a different thing.
It is indeed, and a very useful thing at that!

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