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Mike S., On 17/09/2012 19:05:
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:47 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote:
Mike S., On 17/09/2012 06:07:
> - Tones need vowels, mainly. Xorban formally pretends that predicate
> stems don't have vowels,
Yes and no. /@/ in the environment C@C doesn't count as a "V" for Xorban's morphological rules, but that doesn't mean that at a phonological level stems don't have vowels.
But the formalism doesn't contain /@/ at all. Maybe I should have
said "Xorban formally pretends that predicate stems don't have
phonological vowels"?
I don't think Xorban has any formal account of its phonology so far. I wouldn't say it formally pretends that predicate stems don't have phonological vowels. Rather, it states that predicate stems don't contain Vs, where V is a morphological category; and /@/ does not count as a V. Nothing very much hinges on this point.
> and lots of times they actually don't. So no matter how you slice and
> dice the "words", all the distinctions that tones could make right
> now would effectively be among closed class morphemes i.e. variables
> and operators. We don't really need to do that, precisely because
> they are closed class. In other words Xorban as it stands is a poor
> candidate for tonalization AFAICT.
I don't see a problem here. Ifonly word-final vowel-sequences bear low tone, then /@/ in the environment C@C will always bear high tone, i.e. will never be tonally contrastive.
It's not a problem; it's just that, if I understand your idea, I
don't see a significant net benefit in using tones to (effectively)
increase the number of closed class morphemes. The average CCM would
undoubtedly be shorter, but we'd be asking everyone to learn
something they're not accustomed to, and stems would still be
C(@)C((@)C)* (which is exactly the sort of constraint that I came up
with the L/H idea in order to obviate). But maybe the benefit of your
idea is more than I imagine.
I misunderstood your original point. Yes, I agree that if we went for the word-segmentation by tone option, then that would increase the range of possible word-internal phonological patterns far beyond what is permitted by Xorban, and the language would have to avail itself of the full range of these possibilities.
> - If we wanted to put vowels back in Xorban predicate stems, then we
> would have a good reason for tonalization.
Rather, the tone system would make it possible to rethink the morphological rules for phonological patterns within words.
I've snipped your suggestions for what the patterns could be. I have my own (inchoate) ideas, too. But is it worth the effort of exploring them if the consensus is that tone gets the thumbs down?
Possibly. I'd be interested to see whatever you cook up.
One idea would be for the variable-marking Vs to be intercalated among the Cs, with /@/=o'e (& allowing /@/ to bear contrastive tone). This supposes that function words contain one C and things with multiple Cs are predicates. Orthographic spaces would distinguish /C@-lo/ <C > from /C@-hi/ < C>. The virtue of that scheme is that it saves syllables by not requiring overt o'e that is present only for grammatical reasons and by replacing @s by Vs rather than adding Vs.
But I do think we should be thinking about the issue of tone before investing too much effort in working on the current morphology that's based on toneless phonology.
The morphology is so simple and the number of closed class morphemes
so small that I don't think it would take any Herculean effort to
give Xorban a new "skin". Morneau used to tinker day to day with
parts of his relatively more complex MTIL, and then every few months,
completely burn down his morphology and rebuild it from practically
from scratch. The only thing that killed him is that each time that
he did that, he had a substantial vocabulary that he had to refit
into the new morphology.
And that's where a real rub is: We would need to finalize the
phonology and morphology if we were to start designing the lexicon.
We could design the lexicon, but leave the phonological shape of roots unspecified. That is, you'd decide on the meanings and on the adicity and possibly on whether the stem should be a compound of certain other stems, with the phonology left till later.
> <x, q> for /G, ?/ is less weird than <'> for /h/. Also less
> unwarranted.
>
> IMVHO they're all weird.
<'> has the additional weirdness of not being a letter, tho ther's orthographic precedent of it representing a schwa interconsonantally and [?].
Maybe it's worth considering <'> for the schwa and <q> for [?]. Then
in my compounding scheme, the buffer vowel [y] would always be
implicit (and often silent), and the hyphen vowel [9]/[@] would be
represented by a lightweight punctuation mark.
I guess names would be delimited by <q> only then? What would be the point of having any orthographic representation for schwa? It never has a contrastive function. Oh hang on, which version of which language areyou talking about? Which has [y] for buffer and [@] for hyphen?
As far as <h>, there is some precedence for it standing for [h\], so maybe that should be the letter assigned to [G], if that phoneme where added, leaving <x> for [h] or [x].
<x> for [x, h]. Is [h\] a pharyngeal fricative? If so, that's hard to pronounce in a way integrated into the rest of the speech stream, and unlike [G] it doesn't fill a systemic gap.
Right. We both know where the Lojban list is if we want to talk about Lojban's specification. ObXorban: How would that last sentence be translated in Xorban? Is there some odd illocutionary operator that we don't have yet involved?
I'd use the ordinary assertion marker, "ci" I think it is. Is that what you were asking, or were you asking what would be the xorban for the whole sentence? --And.