Re: Tong-cho-la

>1) There could occasionally be problems where context does not
differentiate
>between (say) "yos-son-ni" and "yo-so-ni".  Most roots are CV, but there
are
>some CVC roots where this could come up.
>
>- Solution?  Remove the CVC roots.  But I don't want to do that, and for
two
>reasons.  First, having them gives you many more possible syllables (and
>therefore root words).  Second, if you have less possible syllables, words
>in general must be longer than otherwise needed.
Here's another solution that you may or may not like. Currently, your
morphemes take the form IVF (initial, vowel, final). If you change your
morphemes to FIV, it would solve the problem. Morphemes of this shape are
not pronounceable by themselves, but they are pronounceable when you link
them together to form a word (as long as the first morpheme is IV). For
example, "tongchola" would break down to "to" "ngcho" and "la". If you
forbid morphemes like "sso" and "nni" then words like "yossonni" cannot
occur. You would have complete control over which consonant clusters can
exist.

Of course, this would still lower the number of possible morphemes (but not
as drastically as removing all CVCs) and it might be too radical of a
change for you (or just plain weird, perhaps). But hey, I'm just throwing
ideas out. =]

~Jonathan~