Re: Formal vs. natural languages (was Re: Oligosynthetic languages in nature.)

R A Brown, On 30/03/2009 08:13:
>>> That does not, of course, mean that one cannot attempt an
>>> oligosynthetic _conlang_ - but so far attempts to do this do not seem
>>> to have met with success.
>
> I see oligosynthesis working only with a community that is isolated from
> the rest of humanity and retains a conservative world-view that
> understands everything in terms of a closed set of semantic primes. That
> is  possibility in an alternate history or a science fiction scenario.
I can quite readily imagine an oligosynthetic language operating with elements
similar to English phonaesthemes. Native English monosyllabic (& 'sesquisyllabic')
words often contain a phonaestheme as their onset or rhyme. It's only a short step
to imagining a language in which every onset and every rhyme is a phonaestheme. A
stem would then consist of the the onset and rhyme that together are semantically
most appropriate to the stem's sense. There'd only be as many fundamental
morphemes as there are distinct onsets and rhymes, so the meanings of these
fundamental morphemes would perforce be rather generic; and most stems would also
be translucently idiomatic, i.e. with meaning partly but not wholly predictable
from the parts.

--And.