Re: [engelang] Re: [jboske] LoCCan3 development ideas. - engelang messages

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 5:21 AM, John Cowan <cowan@hidden.email> wrote:

Leonardo Castro scripsit:

> Has anybody ever created a conlang with
> (1) easy pronunciation (like Toki Pona),
> (2) possibility of unambiguous word-break detection,
> (3) unambiguous syntactic structure,
> (4) one morpheme per word?

Xuxuxi looks like this, though I never developed it far enough to get
into the syntactic structure. The structural words are CV, and the
content words are CVCV..., so that satisfies #1 and #4.

Word-break detection is handled as follows:

1) All content words are stressed on the first syllable.

2) The vowel of the first syllable determines the possible vowels of
the remaining syllables, as follows:

Initial vowel Medial vowels Final vowel
a a,e,o i,u
e,i a,e,i o,u
o,u a,o,u e,i

So the content words have vowel harmony in all vowels but the last,
which has vowel anti-harmony. If the initial vowel is /a/, the harmony
is based on height; otherwise, it's based on frontness. Thus "xuxuxi"
has two back vowels and a front one.

I forget the exact list of consonants, but there are enough so that
all content words, however rare, can be handled in two, three, or four
syllables.

So (writing CAPS for stressed syllables), a stream of CVCVs like
paREboBIlomuguDUzamegiNUfabiLOrumi parses as "pa rebo bilo mu gu duzame
gi nufabi lorumi".

Yes, that is neat too. You've described this system before. Here's one using pitch that I have described before:

Every vowel takes takes one of two pitches, low or high. Every word has the shape (C | H)* L, i.e. zero or more consonants and high vowels followed by a low vowel. Every word break occurs after a low vowel and after every low vowel occurs a word break, e.g.

L H H L <le tomato> 'the tomato'
L L H L <le to mato> 'the two matos' (whatever a mato is)

If you wanted to build an a posteriori lexicon, this system permits arbitrary sequences of segments to be imported with a minimum of fuss; the only real constraint is the mandatory final vowel.

If you want to build a Lojban-style compounding lexicon, then one way would be to give every affix the form C+V+, i.e. one or more consonants followed by one or more vowels. Words get the form {affix}+. All vowels in a word get high pitch except for the last.