Re: Thoughts on Word building

Hi!

Taka Tunu writes:
> Why not consider that any root word is a potential, valid
> "derivational affix"?
My Qthyn|gai does that.  It was inspired by Greenlandic, but in that
language, the correspondence of many (most?) derivational affixes to
normal roots cannot be recognised anymore, but probably most really
stem from roots.

> See Chinese,Japanese, Khmer lexicons. Indonesian uses both a very
> small set of affixes and loads of compounds.
Don't mix up derivation and compounding.  Derivation is a much more
narrow technique of constructing new words.  Chinese is full of very
different kinds of compounds, where the meaning often cannot easily be
derived from the parts -- the new meaning is ad-hoc and then
lexicalised, and not predictably derivable.  It usually does not make
use of derivation, but of compounding.

OTOH, Greenlandic derivation is an operation where a new affix
determines in a defined manner how it alters the meaning of the word
it attaches too.  A lexicon will list the ~500 Greenlandic affixes and
tell you what they do.  (Anyway, there is unpredictability in
Greenlandic, too, which comes from the vagueness of some affixes.
Compounds may be interpreted and lexicalised in a more special way,
and this specialisation cannot be predicted.)

So, derivation is usually not what is done in Chinese (and Japanese).
Here, you put together two words that contribute to the complete
meaning in some unpredictable way.  Which way has to be guessed.

>...
> >From time to time I try to downsize that list, but always come to
> realize that less is less efficient.
Maybe not downsize, but your might just want a different list,
especially for engelangs.  Using a natlang list is often undesirable,
because it is not 'modern' and not philosophical enough in the view of
the conlanger, and will contain many things you'd want to be composed
instead of atomic.  Typically a lot of food and nature words exist,
and many words for typical animals of the area, but virtually
everything about science and philosophy and abstract stuff in general
is missing.  That's how it developed, but the conlanger might not want
it that way.

**Henrik