Re: tolkien?

--- Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...> wrote:

Phonosemantics suggests that
> 'sound symbolism' occurs
> in natlangs: this is the idea that to some extent
> individual phonemes
> contribute to the meaning of morphemes, which sounds
> just like what you're
> describing.  For more information, Wikipedia's
> article on phonosemantics is
> at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonosemantics .
>
> You could explain a pattern like this in other ways
> as well.  For instance,
> if these associations primarily involve nouns, you
> could say that an
> ancestor of your conlang had a noun class system in
> which the classes had
> semantic significance, and class was marked by a
> prefix on nouns.  Then if
> the other morphological expressions of the noun
> class were lost, but the
> prefixes on nouns remained, you would be left with
> groups of semantically
> connected nouns with the same initial segments.

Something like 'sound association' happens in
Silindion, my main project. There are groups of roots
which have similar meanings and sound. An example is:

ka- 'away, separate from (adv, prep)'
kel- 'divide, cleave'
ken- 'border'
kes- 'divide, separate (verb)'
ker- 'split, half'
kil- 'dome' (that which splits the inside from the
outside of a house, a roof, the sky)

I explain this as the residues of an even more ancient
system which expanded the root meaning by adding
suffixes. The original root is 'ke-/ka-'. There are
around 20 or 25 primative roots, and around 400 or so
secondary roots. However, not all secondary roots have
their origins in the existing primative roots, I still
need to create more primative roots, which may or may
not happen.

Elliott





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