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Mike S., On 16/08/2012 13:04:
The thread beginning with <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0905b&L=conlang&F=&S=&P=4004 <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0905b&L=conlang&F=&S=&P=4004>> discovered that given a binary tree, a four-way inflectional contrast on terminal nodes is sufficient to yield an unambiguous parse.
So for example if you were prepared to add a sixth vowel, Y, you could use I,U,O,Y as bracketing markers. (I'd use I,E,U,O for bracketing, and Y for the compounder.) -- This presupposes the trees are binary branching, tho.
It took me a little while to figure out their system; it's very
interesting, but I don't think it's going to be possible for humans
to choose correctly among the four tones (or vowels) on the fly. It
appears to require a highly abstract algorithm to determine where to
the mark the edges of internal groupings.
For easy human parsability, I would suggest the criterion of being incrementally parsable left-to-right with no lookahead. I *think* the Fink--Miller system satisfies that, but I haven't sat down with pen and paper to check, and I don't have the sort of mathematical mind that can tell at a glance. --And.