Re: Disambiguating polysemy (was: "triggers et al" as I presently understand them)
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, November 21, 2004, 16:31 |
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[You will need monospaced font to read this clearly]
On Sunday, November 21, 2004, at 12:05 , Rodlox wrote:
[snip]
> fascinating.
> (and feeling a wee bit of deja vu).
Don't worry. It has been my experience that someone, somewhere, somewhen
has had a similar idea to whatever brilliant idea one has. The thing is to
give it your own twist and the way it occurs in your own conlang will
often give it a novel twist in any case.
> what I'm wondering now (and was even before getting *this* email from
> you),
> is how does one specify between the various meanings of a word?
OK - I'll briefly outline Srikanth's enneasemy scheme for Lin.
Each word in Lin has two dimensions & each dimension has a size of 3, thus
giving the nine different meanings. The two dimensions are: (a)
part-of-speech, (b) generation.
I will show this with the three words: h, i, m [The aim of Lin was
designed to be as brief as possible - I won't go into the pronunciation
system here].
Generation | Adjective Noun Verb
-----------|----------------------------------------
I: "h" | happy human being have
"i" | important I/we become
'm" | many movement make possible
-----------|-----------------------------------------
II: "h" | high station keep
"i" | interesting desire use
'm" | attentive management be relevant
-----------|-----------------------------------------
III: "h" | heavy test rise/raise
"i" | internal return contain
'm" | sweet mark suit
-----------|-----------------------------------------
Words were disambiguated in two ways:
i. The part-of-speech dimension by the syntax of the sentence (which I
wont go into here, except to say it is SVO lang.);
ii. the generation dimension by the use of 'cements'.
There are two series of 'cements':
- external cements, which binds two component heads;
- internal cements, which binds a head to a qualifier.
The external cements are denoted by various symbols, including a single
'white space' (ASCII 32); the internal cements are denoted by the digits 1
to 9. All cements were given rules of pronunciation. The cements, using
the arbitrary words _a_ and _b_, are:
External Generation Internal
cement Sequence cement
a b 1-1 a1b
a+b 2-1 a2b
a=b 3-1 a3b
a\b 1-2 a4b
a|b 2-2 a5b
a:b 3-2 a6b
a*b 1-3 a7b
a^b 2-3 a8b
a%b 3-3 a9b
In my own BrScB, which is likely to be named _brx_, words have only two
possible meanings; they are disambiguated by a system of vowel harmony
(child's play compared to Srikanth's scheme :)
Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
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