Re: beautiful scripts (to Christophe/Amber)

Matt33 wrote:
> By the way, my half-hearted attempt at my conlang
> (Vya:a:h) has left me stumped.  The script appears a
> pseudo-Khmer script written in form of Hangul, but
> also incorporates the Chinese/Japanes system of
> pictograms for up to the 500 most common concepts.
> I'm stumped, however, with how to keep the
> "3-to-an-inverted-triangle-set" concept I want, as
> most of the vocab are polythetic (is that the right
> word? -- ie, very long words).
The word you're looking for, I think, is polysynthetic, although I'm not
sure if that is the word that describes how Vya:a:h is.  It is my
understanding that polysynthetic means a lot of morphemes in one word, and
some muddying has transpired (over time) that has blurred the morpheme
boundaries.  Such as example would be this Navajo verb:
Nshiit'áázh
ni-s-iid-'áázh
TERMINATIVE-PREFECTIVE-1.DUAL.Subj-two.walk.PERFECTIVE
'We two went'
Notice how the actual verb (first line) does not have the clarity of
morphemes in the second line (which is the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss) (i.e.
the actual verb isn't nisiidáázh)--this is what I mean by muddying.

However, Vya:a:h might be agglutinative, which is close to polysynthetic,
but not quite the same. There are still a lot of morphemes, but they segment
very nicely, as in this Turkish verb:
veriyorsunuz
ver-i-yor-sunuz
Give-epenthetic vowel-PRESENT-2PL
'You (pl.) are giving'
Not only are the morphemes clear in this verb, but they are clear throughout
the language.

However, you should probably take the above with a grain of salt--this is
more my take on polysynthesis than an definitive definition, and I have the
impression that there isn't a lot of consensus as to what would be a
definite definition (Although everyone seems to agree that polysynthesis, at
least partially, includes the presence of lots of morphemes within a single
word).

Perhaps more than you wanted to know, but hopefully helpful.
--Doug

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