Re: Circumfixes?

En réponse à claudio <claudio.soboll@...>:

> hi !
> well your partly right.
> every odd language produces no problems for their native speakers and
> if it is one with  OSV syntax.
> but is this really true ?
> "problems" is a big word. i know from german, that when you read a
> newspaper, you have not seldom to read up to 40 words until you can
> finally understand which is actually meant, memorizing them and
> reading becomes more dificult.
Well, this is more a matter of style than of language in itself. Believe me,
even French newspapers are difficult to understand, even though French is a SVO
language with adjectives following their nouns. If I see a 40-word sentence, I
will probably have to read it twice or three times before I can understand what
it means. Knowing the verb is usually far from enough :) .

> e.g. the verb can reveal a negtation or not, until you have read it you
> cant
> be sure if all the sentence means something or the complete opposite of
> it.
> so to say "all natives master their own (odd) language" is ok
> but we also know that averagely e.g. communication-in-english is a third
> shorter
> than communication-in-german with the same content. so we better talk
> of "disadvantages" than of "problems"
True, but still I take it to be more of a matter of style than of language
itself. For instance, Japanese, with it's CV morphology, produces very long
words. Moreover, it is SOV, which doesn't help either :) . Still, as far as I
have seen, Japanese utterances are about as long as the English equivalents (or
the French equivalents for that matter). But if you translate them word-by-word,
you discover that even though the two utterances mean the same, their structure
is so different that you can hardly compare them. In one word, if you use
Japanese with an English mind, your utterances will be far longer than the
equivalent English ones. But if you follow the Japanese mind, they will end up
as long (and sometimes shorter) than the equivalent ones. As for written German,
it has here a reputation of accuracy (in the scientific domain where I dwell,
German science books are considered more accurate than English and French ones),
that's to say that when writing about the same thing, a German writer will want
to be more accurate than an English one or a French one. If this is true, then
it doesn't surprise me that German gets longer than English. Accuracy costs
place.

> --
> anyway i think the most interesting part in developing  a conlang is
> to have new open space for neologisms , for terms which are only hard
> to describe in a natural language.
>
> and i think too that the most tricky part in designing is to
> wipe out the ambiguity of  compound-words, whereas i see no other
> solution than to force the use of prepositions. e.g. instead of
> "spiderfear": a) "fear-of-spiders" or b) "fear-about-spiders",
> the problem is to make the prepositions short enough , and i think
> 1 syllable is still too long. because the human mind has the
> principle "simplicity over accuracy" so it rather cuts out a meaning
> and causes ambiguity if the accuracy is a matter of longer words.
>
You talk like Matthias Lassailly, a fellow French conlanger who used to be quite
active on the list until two years ago. He was building his conlang Tunu exactly
in the way you describe, to wipe out all the ambiguity, whether in sentences or
in compound words (in his language, both were working the same way).

> my question is : how do you solve this in your conlang ?
> regards,
> c.s.
>
I usually don't solve this problem, since for many things what I'm looking for
*is* ambiguity :)) . I find it so nice to have to resort to context to
understand what something means :)) . For that, my conlang Notya goes quite far
in that matter, being more ambiguous than any real language out there (that's
easy, it doesn't make a difference between nouns and verbs, not even between
meaningfull words and function words - that's to say that it doesn't make any
difference between a noun and a preposition :) - . How can you be more ambiguous
than that? :) ). Azak uses German-like compounds, and thus is about as ambiguous
as German is. Moten, like my two Romance conlangs Reman and Narbonósc, is not
very keen on compounding, and like French resorts more to noun phrases, which
may be a little longer than their English equivalents, but are usually more
accurate. Anyway, I usually want to be quite naturalistic, and thus leave in my
conlangs the level of ambiguity that you find in almost any natural language.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr