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

>* 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