Re: Polysemy

On Tuesday, November 18, 2003, at 01:37 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
[snip]

>> At present it is proposed to use vowels as cements between lexical
>> morphemes
>> in compounds, thus:
>> i between front-vowel and front-vowel morphemes, e.g. ftibl /"fiti'pEli/
>> e between front-vowel and back-vowel morphemes,  e.g. ftebl /"fiti'pOlu/
>> o between back-vowel and front-vowel morphemes,  e.g. ftobl /"futu'pEli/
>> u between back-vowel and back-vowel morphemes    e.g. ftubl /"futu'pOlu/
>>
>> The ' and - cements join a lexical morpheme to a string of one or more
>> suffixes.
>> For example, ft-pl /"futubOlu/ has _three_ morphemes, viz. ft+p+l
>
> But if the consonants indicated the vowels - as per the "bizarre" scheme
> - you
> wouldn't need more than one cement for compounds, yes?
Quite right - but if the bizarre scheme is used, then there is no polysemy.
  'ft' will have
only _one_ possible pronunciation and, therefore, only one meaning.

> Then gl and brd would be monomorphemic words, lt-tk and gml-brd compounds
> (restoring the traditional function of the hyphen)
Yep.

> and ltak and brod bisyllabic
> words with monoconsonantal affixes of various classes.
Nope - we wouldn't need _any_ vowel symbols; we need only two 'cements',
the hyphen
to separate lexical morphemes and another, maybe the dot, to denote that
suffixes follow
(as in the transliteration of ancient Egyptian usually adopted by
Egyptologists).  Indeed,
they hardly deserve the name 'cement', at least in the Srikanthian sense;
I guess the term
is 'intrapunct'.

> I may still be misisng something ...
Well, yes - but probably my fault.

The polysemy mail was harking back to BrScB _before_ the 'bizarre'
spelling proposal.  It
looked nifty when I explained it for two-consonant morphemes.  But as I
follow through the
ramifications, it is appearing less feasible.

I was testing to see if the following were practical:
(a) a word like _nfr_ having two pronunciations, /nɛfilɛ/ or /nɔfulɔ/ and,
  therefore, two meanings.
(b) the vocalization - and therefore the meaning - of _nfr_ determined by
"cements".

I guess the 'bizarre' scheme should be called BrScC    :)

=====================================================================
Hey, who was the guy who thought up the pseudonym BrSc?  I'm finding it a
real pain to
type BrScA, BrScB, BrScC - all that use of the shift key!!!! Ach!

It seems to me that 'bs' is an even better abbreviation of 'briefscript'
(or, of Philip prefers,
'Brown script'  :)
I think instead of the awkward BrSc, BrScA, BrScB, BrScC, it would be
better to have:
bs0, bs1, bs2, bs3.


Ray
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