Re: Most developed conlang

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:09:57 -0400, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:

>> > I think Alex Fink's suggestions were probably
>> > along the right lines, at least vis-a-vis lexicon
>> > counting: count only the outermost branching.
>>
>> But when the result of previous branching steps are not part of the
>> lexicon, e.g. because two morphemes are added to form a new word while
>> adding only the first one leaves you with garbage, then it's not the
>> best way, I think.  However, I would propose to multiply all
>> boundaries not resulting in anything already in the lexicon so that
>> you get a recursive derivation tree.
>>
>> E.g. if you have ABC in the lexicon already and want to add ABCDE and
>> if ABCD does not exist, the either assign the operation +DE one score
>> and use this for a lexicon entry, or multiply the scores of +D and +E.
>
>That makes sense.
>
>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?  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, 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.)
My inclination there would be to say that "[malmangx]ema" 'nauseous' and
"mal[mangxem]a" 'unhungry' are simply two different homonymous words.
Maintaining the shallow perspective of looking at only the outermost
derivational operation, there's no difference between this case and
ambiguities like "fil-ino" 'daughter' vs. "fi-lino" 'contemptible linen'.
Sure, "[malmangx]ema" and "mal[mangxem]a" are eventually made of the same
morphemes, but we can't see that far down the derivational tree.

Granted, this viewpoint has problems with cases like "malvarmega", where the
two derivational processes commute.  It doesn't seem right to insist that
there be two words "malvarmega".  Not sure what to do about these.

Alex