Re: Most developed conlang

Hi!

Jim Henry writes:
> On 4/25/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>...
> But what if you are adding a word that could be equally plausibly
> derived from more than one word already in the lexicon -- by more
> than one route?
Good question.

Probably I'd firstly prefer the one that needs fewer additional
morphemes.  In case of parity, I'd prefer the more transparent one.
In case of parity, I'd throw the dice.

> A trivial example is E-o "mal-varm-eg-a" -- OPP-warm-AUG-ADJ.  It
> could come from "mal-varm-a" or from "varm-eg-a".  I say "trivial"
> because in this case the degree of transparency and the meaning are
> the same in either case,
>...
I'd throw the dice here, I think.

>... but I suspect there are other less transparent, more ambiguous
>two-route compounds that are not coming to mind at the moment.  --
>Ah, here's one, perhaps a bit contrived: mal-mangx-em-a.  Is it
>derived from "mangx-em-a" or from "mal-mangxi-i"?  Does it mean "not
>tending to eat = not hungry" or "tending to vomit = nauseous"?
>("Nemangxema" would not be ambiguous like this.)
This seems an easy case then: just use the one that reflects the
meaning of the new word best.

There are also quite interesting cases where compounds are compounded
from parts that don't exist in isolation.  E.g German 'Himbeere'
('raspberry') and 'Brombeere' ('blackberry'). *'Him' and *'Brom' do
not exist.  Quite frequent this is actually, and one would of course
assume full opaqueness, but it's funny in compounds anyway where one
would expect both parts to exist.  English 'raspberry' may be similar
(or does it indeed derive from 'to rasp'??).  And there was a
discussion about 'strawberry' on this list once.

BTW, in Dutch, the blackberry is 'braam' which is the words whose
cognate *'Brom' is missing in isolation in German.

I have some cases in the Þrjótrunn lexicon where I created entries for
such words (often for entries that used to exist in Latin but were
lost in isolation later).  Examples are verbs with prefixes like
English 'exclude' and 'include'.  I'd first make an entry *'to clude'
with all its stem forms and marked for non-existence in isolation, and
then derive several verbs from this entry by added prefixes.

Sometimes it is not even clear whether the derivation is fully opaque
when you know the vague meaning of the original part (e.g. when you
know that *'Brom' is probably an old word meaning 'blackberry', then
the extension to 'Brombeere' is totally transparent).  So for lexicon
entry scores, everal possibilities of distributing the score seem to
exist.

The longer one thinks about this, the easier it becomes to do
something less abysmal... :-)

**Henrik

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