Re: Small Derivational Idea

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:46 AM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
[snip]
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 1∞28 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>
>> What's absurd about supposing -os to be an ending? Its etymology, the
>> repeat occurence in Marcos, and its disappearance in derivations like
>> _carlista_ are certainly suggestive of endingness.
>
> The question is if it's an ending to *modern* speakers the way /-um/,
> /-us/ and /-a/ were endings to Latin speakers.  I suspect it's not, but
> that it's used as an analogical model for adding things like /-it/.
I'm not quite clear what what distinction you are making here - when a
Latin speaker leapt to the conclusion that an unfamiliar word ending
in -a had a plural in -ae they was presumably indulging in analogical
modeling - but "I suspect it's not" seems a far cry from "absurd".

> More importantly, if you posit, let's say, two masculine endings, /-o/
> and /-os/, then there's no reason why you couldn't have /-men/ or
> /-tifuli/, or anything as a masculine ending.  By positing these as
> allomorphs of the same underlying morpheme, you deny the similarity
> in shape, or their evolution--and the same goes for positing /-it/ and
> /-it-/.  Formally, it looks like an accident that the forms are similar.
Clearly there are some theoretical presuppositions at work here that
I'm not aware of. Why should the claim that /-os/ and /-o/ are
allomorphs of a masculine suffix be construed as saying anything
whatsoever about their evolution? What's the problem with saying
Spanish *could* have had /-men/ as a masculine ending? I would have
thought the fact it does not is a historical accident.

>>> This is what one is forced to do, though,
>>> if one takes seriously the claim that languages are separated into
>>> atoms, and each of these atoms contains a unique meaning,
>>> and meaning is the mere combination of these atoms.  I can
>>> understand why a linguist might want to be constrained thus, but
>>> why a conlanger?
>>
>> I've got grave doubts that the majority or even a significant minority
>> of users of the term "morpheme" accept those claims.
>
> Of course, the users of the term "morpheme" encompass more than
> the community of linguists.  :)
In my experience, it encompasses linguists, conlangers, and language
teachers. But it seems to me the association of the term with those
claims is far from complete even among professional linguistics - I've
seen ones speak of empty morphemes that carry no meaning (eg. -t- in
dramatic), of words whose meanings are not reducible to those of their
constituent morphemes (eg. "thriller"), and of words containing what's
clearly a morpheme combined with something that appears to have no
independent meaning (no English examples come to mind). What I can't
recall seeing is anyone explicitly accepting those claims.

(Is this a descriptive v. theoretical linguistics thing? I pretty much
only read the former sort.)

>> But there's at
>> least one obvious reason a conlanger might want to be so constrained -
>> lots of people find its easier to be creative when working under
>> constraints rather than in total freedom.
>
> I certainly agree.  And if someone has laid hold of some sort of
> framework or theoretical idea to artificially constrain one's creation
> by choice, that's their choice, and it's interesting to see what the
> results are given those choices.  If, however, this is not a consciously
> accepted choice, that's what I object to.  Many I suspect simply
> accept the idea of a morpheme, and, as a result, create highly
> concatenative conlangs--more so than any natural language
> (even Turkish).
Perhaps. I wasn't aware morphemes were supposed to necessarily be
concatenative, so while some of my conlangs are pretty concatenative,
I don't think this can be ascribed to the idea of morphemes!

(Meghean has a plural marker that variously manifests as /-an/, /-n/
or /-n-/+fortification of the following consonant. I suppose you'd say
describing this in terms of morphemes would be absurd?)



--
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?

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