Re: "nonasemy" ( was: Re: your conlang, please? (Rich Aunt gets hold

At 1:29 pm +0000 8/10/98, And Rosta wrote:
>Skrintha:
>> In broad outline, Lin is a compact lang, with a compression factor of
>> about >3.0 wrt English. Ex., "i5o m" means all of '(the) important
>> agreement is possible'. It has the feature of nonasemy, whereby each word
>> of the lang has at least 9 meanings (three PoS decked on three
>> generations).
>
>Shdn't that be "enneasemy"?
Yes, certainly "enneasemy" would be better, in the same way that a
nine-sided figure is better called an "enneagon".  Alas, mathematicians
I've met haven't a clue what I'm talking about & politely tell me that the
thing is a "nonagon".

The prefix 'nona-' is a back formation from the correctly derived
"nonagenarian" & "nonagesimal".  The final -a- of the prefix also matches
the final -a- of the real Greek derivatives so, alas, the incongruity of
this mock Latin one is not noticed by an age for whom the ugly hybrid
"hexadecimal" is quite acceptable  :=(

So we must allow Skrintha his 'nonasemy'  :)

>> Disambiguations of these meanings at sentence-level is by
>> the use of 'bi-valent morphemes' or plain 'interfixes', ie., adfixes that
>> join two words.
I'm longing to see Lin.  "i5o m" = '(the) important agreement is possible'
Wow!! that really _is_ a briefscript!

>> As to Hambhukringki, it relies on certain symmetries in semantic space. It
>> generalizes usual actions and meanings into their symmetric supersets
>> along more than one axis (space/time/internal-space). At sentence-level
>> the symmetries are broken through the *interaction* of different words
>> (rather than modifying a single word depending on its clause-role), with
>> the result that there are no words that are completely
>> nouns/verbs/qualities, but words that carry part of these meanings: in
>> short, fractional PoS!
>
>This is the scary result you get when a physicist invents a language!
I like the sound of it!  I really do.

When can have more of Lin & Hambhukringki?

Ray.