Re: Thoughts on Word building

Hi!

Taka Tunu writes:
> Henrik wrote:
>
> <<<
> > A conlanger could make up "country+love" and "king+country" (or
> > reversely "love+country" and "country king", depending how his
> > conlang works.) ...
> But thes is not derivation, then, do we agree? This as compounding.
> (snip)
> But these are again compounds. I thought you said we're talking about
> derivation here (see the beginning of my paragraph). I'm confused.
> Are you saying these are derivation? Or do we agree these are
> compounding?
> >>>
>
> Are you serious?  Where did I write that this is derivation?
*sight*  I just try to understand your point, that's all.
Obviously I fail.  Please don't get upset.

I'll try to analyse.

Your first post about this topic starts like this:

> Why not consider that any root word is a potential, valid
> "derivational affix"?  See Chinese,Japanese, Khmer lexicons. ...
By now, we seem to agree that you are talking about compounding here.
When I first read that, I thought you *really* meant 'derivational
affix' here and gave Greenlandic as a possible example where
originally free roots are now used as derivational suffixes, and said
that, e.g., Chinese is not so good an example, because it uses
compounding.

Your paragraph then continues and contrasts derivation with
compounding:

> ... Indonesian uses both a very small set of affixes and loads of
> compounds. The so-called "power" of affixes is their fuzziness. For
> instance "invention" is either an process or a result. Affixing and
> compounding are different in the sense that affixing requires making
> a whole kind of lame second lexicon. With compounds, "Esthetics" may
> be more evocative "beauty feeling", "beauty yearning", "beauty
> concept", etc.
I agreed with that, but did not understand why you used 'derivational
affix' in the first sentence.


When reading your second post, I did not find much to disagree.  You
were quite energetic in telling me that I did not understand, though.
You wrote that we definitely disagree.  I tried to find disagreement
and identified two possible items:

   a) the ratio between compounding and derivation on Chinese and
      Japanese

   b) whether compounding creates ad-hoc meanings

a) cannot be solved without counting, so we need numbers.  It's futile
to discuss without them, so I did not.  And maybe we don't even
disagree here, I thought.

So I inferred that b) was where we disagree.  I inferred that you say
that the meaning in compounds of the kind you use in your conlang and
that is used in Indonesian, is clearly composed.  I also inferred that
when only considering one type of compounding in Chinese, you say that
the precise meaning is easily inferable, too.

I gave more examples of Chinese compounds.  You told me about the
ambiguity in Chinese since there are several types of composition
(which I know).  Therefore, this time, I gave examples of only one
kind of compounding, namely verb + object, and explained that the
compounds still have ad-hoc meaning.

In your last post, you repeat that there are several types of
compositon that lead to ambiguity.  I know that.  I was not showing
ambiguity of modification, but ad-hoc composition of meaning.

You now give examples of compounds in Indonesian, and again, I agree,
there is no ambiguity of what modifies what.  Still, the composition
of the meaning is ad-hoc.  The semantical operation of the
modification has to be inferred.  You always know that the head is
first in Indonesian, but not how the modifier changes the head's
semantics.  You say it is 'consistent'.  Do you mean the meaning is
consistently, predictably composed, or do you mean what modification
order consistently the same in every step of compounding, or do you
mean both?

I cannot answer but on the meta level now, because I do not get the
reason for this argument.

**Henrik