Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Joshua Shinavier wrote:

> btw. what do the pointy brackets mean?  [] are for IPA, // are for
> orthography -- are <> the same thing?  Thanks,
>
> Josh
>
It is customary to enclose affixes in <>. For example:

The first person plural suffix <-ya> 1p is only used with
the present tense prefix <e-> PRS. The suffix <-ya> 1p has
an allomorph <-ja> after consonant final verb roots, for
instance in _ya e-qek-ja_, 'I go'.

My teacher at university used to insist that every mention
of an affix was preceded by a full label, and followed
by the abbreviation - but that's a bit much, and makes
for more difficult reading.

In most grammars of languages that have not been reduced
to writing before, the affixes are given in a sort of
orthography, not in a full phonetic or phonemic
transcription. Full forms are not given between angular
brackets; rather they are italicised.

What I still don't get myself is when the morphemes
in a form should be separated by dashes, and when by
dots - the latter fashion came in just as I went out
of university.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt