Re: Most developed conlang

Hi!

Jim Henry writes:
> On 4/22/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>...
> >   - count polysynthetically constructed words several times,
> >     excluding structures that are semantically clear operations,
> >     but counting all irregularly derived concepts
>
> I don't think we need to treat polysynthetic words
> specially, as such.  Would it make sense just to
> count the number of morpheme boundaries in a
> word and see how many of those result in a
> semantically opaque compounding?
> Even with that qualification I'm not sure I agree
> with you -- it seems to me that a semantically
> opaque compound built of 5 morphemes and
> another one built of 2 morphemes should both
> count as one word in the lexicon.
Definitely.  This is how I want to count, too.  The problem with
polysynthetic words may be that one phonological word might contain
several such compounds (e.g. due to incorporation).  I just want to
point out that this might need special consideration not found in
other languages.

Probably with the right wording of the counting rules, a polysynthetic
lang can be handled without special rules.  I agree.

>
> > This seems quite reasonable.  Do you also think it's a good way of
> > counting?  It also looks undoable since the lexicons are generally not
> > structured like this.
>
> Of course in starting a new lexicon for a new language one could
> easily have a field for "semantic transparency", or perhaps an
> integral field indicating how many words (or "lexical items") each
> entry counts for (1 for root words and opaque compounds, 0 for
> irregular forms and transparent compounds; 1 for idioms and stock
> phrases?).
That would definitely be very cool!  I will consider this for my
lexicons -- it will make an additional way of filtering possible.

> On the other hand, transparency/opacity is a
> continuous rather than a boolean quality.
Also very true.  It may even be impossible to agree in some cases.

>...
> On the gripping hand, maybe the "semantic transparency"
> needs to be applied at the morpheme boundary level
> rather than the word level.  For instance, in E-o
> "el-don-ej-o" there are three morpheme boundaries,
> one perfectly transparent (ej-o), one somewhat
> transparent (between el-don and -ej), and one
> almost completely opaque (el-don).  We might
> assign them transparency (or rather opacity)
> scores of
>
> el-  don -ej -o
>   0.95, 0.20, 0.0
Hehe. :-)  This would require a lot of more thinking for
each lexicon entry...

> or thereabouts.  How would we combine these to
> get an overall opacity score for the word?
The total score should of course be the product of those values, since
from the core pieces, each level of opaqueness influences the
opaqueness of the whole by its morpheme boundary level.

> ... Another complicating factor is that
> we don't want the presence of both
> "eldoni" and "eldonejo" in the lexicon to inflate
> the count too much since the latter builds on
> the former and is almost transparent if you already
> know "eldoni". ...
This is more tricky, yes.  In the lexicon an Þrjótrunn, I have an
operation that cuts off parts of an existing entry for construction of
a new one.  Maybe that would be feasible?

**Henrik

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