Maximal flexibility with self-segregating morphology

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 9:53 AM, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
[...]
> ...and a third method might be along the lines John Cowan outlined for
> xuxuxi:
>
> {quote}
> xuxuxi uses vowel harmony/disharmony to resolve the problem.
> All multi-syllable words are stressed on the first syllable,
> and then the other syllables of the word, except the last,
> have vowel harmony.  The last syllable of the word has disharmony.
> Any remaining syllables before the next stressed syllable are
> monosyllabic.
>
> Here's the harmony/disharmony table:
>
> first           medial          last
> a               a, e, o         i, u
> e               a, e, i         o, u
> i               a, e, i         o, u
> o               a, o, u         i, e
> u               a, o, u         i, e
>
> So a in the first syllable triggers height harmony, and all other vowels
> trigger front/back harmony.
> {/quote}
>
> See:
> http://archives.conlang.info/fhe/quachin/dhirwulqoen.html
And some extra from the link:

Gary Shannon scripsit:
>...
> I've always favored open syllables. They are neat and
> tidy and east to synthesize. But there's a parsing
> probelem with the spoken language.
[...]
> So here's the solution that occured to me as I was
> dozing off last night:
>
> Words take the form CVV or VCVV or CVCVV or VCVCVV or
> CVCVCVV or VCVCVCVV, etc., where the final syllable
> must always have a vowel pair and no other syllable in
> a word is permitted to have a vowel pair.
This sounds like a good plan. And since it depends entirely on a
marking at the end of a word to accomplish word-segregation, there's
no inherent restriction on consonant clusters internal to the word,
which provides a bit of extra freedom. But what if we *want*
word-internal vowel sequences? The harmony system has no problem with
vowel sequences, but it restricts the number of ways you can mix
vowels in words, and the final-pair system has no problem with mixing
up the entire vowel inventory, but it has issues with internal
sequences. Combining the two, however, we can get a system that has
the strengths of both-

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. Thus, you can use any single vowels you
want internally, and you can use some types of vowel sequences.

It occurs to me also that the final-pair marking system without
initial vowels is essentially equivalent to a surrounding-vowel
system, where all words start and end with a vowel, except that each
initial vowel is shifted backwards by one word. But with the
final-pair system we can still have words starting with vowels if we
want, and even starting with sequences of vowels after restricting the
class of final pairs. This has potentially fun implications for
sandhi, which might trigger elisions or insertion of extra dividing
consonants depending on the relation between the final vowels of one
word and the initials of the next.

We can even still have words ending in consonants after the final pair
if there's a restriction on what consonants can appear word-initially,
so as we don't get confused as to whether the ending consonant does
belong at the end of the last word or the beginning of the next. Even
without such a restriction, though, we can have some artistic fun by
still putting in normally-unpronounced final consonants, as in French,
that become pronounced when the following word meets certain
conditions (those extra diving consonants I mentioned). They don't
carry any additional information, so it doesn't matter which word they
get parsed as being assigned to (as long as they don't produce
confusing homophony on the following word).

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).

-l.

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