Re: Polysemy

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> On Sunday, November 16, 2003, at 03:56 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
> [snip]
>
> >> Is this modest degree of polysemy tolerable?
> >
> > I cannot see anything wrong with it in principle, but remind me why vowel
> > letters shouldn't be used; _dmet_, _dmot_. Looks alot more like actual
> > words.
>
> 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?

Then gl and brd would be monomorphemic words, lt-tk and gml-brd compounds
(restoring the traditional function of the hyphen) and ltak and brod bisyllabic
words with monoconsonantal affixes of various classes.

I may still be misisng something ...

                                                          Andreas

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