Re: Maximal flexibility with self-segregating morphology

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
[...]
> Altogether, this results in the most flexible self-segregating
> morphological system I have yet seen (although, it only addresses
> segregating words, rather than individual morphemes, but a
> word-internal segregation system could be superimposed fairly easily).
Having thought about this more over the course of the day, I have come
to a conclusion which I thought was rather profound, but I suspect
many people will find blatantly obvious-
there is a sliding scale of flexibility vs. ease of parsing, such that
there is no maximally flexible segregating morphology in an abstract
objective sense; rather, there's a maximally
flexible morphology with respect to the structure already imposed by a
language's phonotactics, and how much mental effort your willing to
put into parsing out words.

-l.