Re: Squishing Lexemes together into one syllable

Hi!

Leon Lin writes:
> Hello! I'm new here.
Welcome to the list! :-)

>...
> 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 = ??
How to you construct the result?  Am I missing something?  Or is this
already some mathematical structure that produces seemingly arbitrary
syllables that are not connected phonologically?  The above looks like
you are doing this phoneme-wise by some 'average' phoneme, however
that is defined.

>...
> 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.
Of course, the numbers grow quite quickly this way and so you need
longer words.  If you take Ygyde, which uses *all* its possible
syllables as roots IIRC, there is nothing left to use for composite
numbers.  And for a phonology that is that simple (say, 5 vowels + 20
consonants), you'll exceed the available syllable when you define only
six roots as prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13.  Here, 11 * 13 cannot
be mapped uniquely to one of 100 syllables anymore.

Do I misunderstand your idea?

Anyway, since human languages hardly work on numbers but on
phonological units, this is quite a theoretical construction not used
in natlangs.

> I am interested in such languages but so far I haven't found
> one. Maybe I'll be the first to make one.
That's what conlangs are for. :-)

**Henrik

Reply