Re: New Polysynthetic (?) Language

David J. Peterson wrote:
> Joseph F. wrote:
> <<
> Anyone here interested in polysynthetic languages?  I've been working
> on something like one for a bit and have just finished translating the
> North Wind and the Sun:
> http://www.geocities.com/altyaltynalma/northwindandsun_dinew.html
> >>>
>
> I'm sorry for the slightly tangential reply, but this has *really*
> been bugging for a long time.
>
> When I follow Joseph's link, I get a question mark surrounded
> by a diamond for every accented character.  This is ridiculous.
> I have every Unicode font under the sun; there's *no* reason
> why this should be happening; I use Unicode *everywhere* on
> my site; and yet...
>
> Does this have something to do with the fact that I use a Mac?
> Both Safari and Firefox display question marks.  If I view the
> source I get question marks.  Am I doing something wrong?
> Has anyone had a similar experience?
I have no idea what's causing that.  It looks right to me when I look at
the code in a plain text editor, in Dreamweaver, and in Firefox.  The
font I've specified is "Palatino Linotype", but failing that it's set to
try "Times New Roman", then "Times", then your generic "serif" font.

Hang on - it looks like I didn't explicitly set the encoding to
Unicode.  That's changed now.  It looks the same to me, but your mileage
may vary.  Now, if that fixes it for you, what I won't understand is why
the source code didn't look right for you before.

>
> Regarding the language, according to wikipedia...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_languages
>
> ...your language counts as polysynthetic.  I find it troubling
> that the entire definition depends on the notion of the morpheme.
> I wonder how much of linguistics would be left if you remove
> the notion of the morpheme, or treated it as nothing more than
> a sociological byproduct of the field...?
>
> -David
While it might not be the easiest thing to define, I think a morpheme
does have a real existence, and so a means of categorizing languages
based on their morphemes in some way is reasonable.  The one that's
harder to define is a "word", at least in my opinion.

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