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Morphones (was: German with Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja?)

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Monday, August 4, 2008, 7:22
>* John Vertical said on 2008-08-01 10:03:43 +0200 >> > Henrik Th. said: >> > Such an ending would not be used to write phonetically (e.g. names), >> > but only for inflectional endings that are -e. By this, I'd >> > probably be able to cut down the required endings for German to >> > about 10 or so: the vowel would be -e- /@/ anyway (which is dropped >> > frequently when the stem permits it) and then there are only a >> > handful of consonants used in endings: -e, -(e)t, -(e)n, -(e)r, >> > -(e)m, -(e)s. They are then used for a vast number of different >> > things, of course. >> >> Those are called "morphones", right? (The name seems to be something >> of a phoneme : phone :: morpheme : X construction, tho the analogy is >> a little off considering it's a superset, not an element. But still >> less abstract...) > >I think you mean "morph". phoneme - phone - allophone vs. morpheme - >morph - allomorph. > >t.
You're right, that's what should go into my X slot there... that leaves "morphone" hanging then, tho. So we have- * morpheme: unit of meaning * phoneme: unit of sound * morph: a particular element of meaning * phone: a particular sound * morphone: an element of one or more phonemes with one or more meanings That's a bit awkward-sounding, but it's after all not as basic a concept. It also leaves me wondering, can we apply the "-eme distinction" to it independantly? We can note allophonic or allomorphic forms of a single morphone, but is there any intermediate level of variation? Also, as long as I'm going off-tangent... if some, but not all, allomorphs of two morphemes overlap, does that count as a morphone? Or are only phonemically equivalent morphemes eligible to be joined as such? And then there's the question when *partial* morphemes are to be considered, say, English ///@r/// which occurs but is not separate in words like "theater". (The triple-slash notation is fully ad hoc here.) Google is not finding much of use, merely an indication that the term *is* in linguistic use separately from the first four. John Vertical