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Squishing Lexemes together into one syllable

From:Leon Lin <leon_math@...>
Date:Monday, January 8, 2007, 0:19
Hello! I'm new here. This seems like a good place where knowledgable
linguists can answer my questions.

According to Wikipedia: A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a
language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. How about high lexeme-per-word
ratio languages (is there a name for this (polysynthetic?))? We already have
those, like the oligosynthetic Ygyde. But Ygyde makes a whole new syllable
for every lexeme added. I was thinking putting them into one syllable (or
how ever many syllables the original lexemes had themselves):

ba + bi = be?
pi + ku = ty?
maba + qubi = nobe?
mama + papa = ??

Does anyone know of a language does this? I am not talking about the kind of
language that makes abitrary inflections that could almost be considered
lexemes, but rather those that can put together any two lexemes. Languages
like Lin which have words containing only one phoneme don't count as putting
them together doubles the length, which should stay the same.

d + a = da

Mathematically this problem is quite simple. We can use prime numbers for
root lexemes and composite numbers can be the compounds of the prime numbers
that multiply to it. Thanks to the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, every
number has a unique prime factorization.

I am interested in such languages but so far I haven't found one. Maybe I'll
be the first to make one.

Thanks, Leon (I hope the spacing isn't all mixed up)

Reply

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>