Re: Maximal flexibility with self-segregating morphology

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:

> Rather than using any pair of vowels to mark the end of a word, what
> about having classes of vowels, with particular class pairings being
> reserved for boundary-marking, but leaving other pairing free for use
> internally? The classes don't have to based on harmony, but that seems
> a natural choice. Rather than all vowels except the last harmonizing
> with the first in a word, you could have all vowel pairs being
> harmonious or all disharmonious except the last. This also opens up
> more freedom with affixing, because the internal vowels of a word
> won't have to change to re-harmonize with the new initials or new
> terminals provided by affixes.
In languages with vowel harmony, it's usually the
affixes whose vowels alter to harmonize with the
root, not vice versa.  The reverse would be an
interesting experiment; how would you handle
multiple affixes?  The last suffix or the first
prefix determines the harmony pattern of the
whole word?

> Thus, you can use any single vowels you
> want internally, and you can use some types of vowel sequences.
Or maybe, as Larry suggested, use diphtongizable
vowel sequences as your final pairs and non-diphthongizable
pairs as the initial/medial pairs.  Or vice versa.
That is, any pair that includes one of /i/ ~ /j/
or /u/ ~ /w/ is allowed in one position, and other
pairs that include neither of those are allowed
in the other positions.

If you have the usual 5-vowel auxlang/fauxlang
system, that would give you 16 diphthongs
and 9 non-diphthong vowel pairs; or 6 and 14
if you rule out sequences of two instances of the
same vowel (/aa/, /ee/, /ii/), or diphthongs with
the vowel and semivowel allophones of the same
phoneme (/ij/ /ji/ /uw/ and /wu/).

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/