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

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'), b) the language may distinguish compound and phrase:
English often uses stress for that, German has different forms:
'Jungfrau' vs. 'junge Frau'.

> ... 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. :-)

> ...  My point was that borrowing is often much more convenient than
> verbose circumscriptions,
Definitely.  Yet compounding is a different thing.

**Henrik