Changes: List of self-segregating morphology methods

Revision as of 13:29, 4 June 2007

This page is for a list of methods for self-segregating morphology: ways you can design a conlang so that morpheme boundaries, or word boundaries, or both, are always obvious and unambigious.

Here are a couple of threads about the topic:

A thread started by Rex May in March 2006 on the AUXLANG mailing list
A thread started by Jim Henry in April 2006 on the CONLANG mailing list

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 *[http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0603c&L=auxlang&P=3437 A thread started by Rex May in March 2006] on the AUXLANG mailing list
 *[http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0604c&L=conlang&P=1903 A thread started by Jim Henry in April 2006] on the CONLANG mailing list
-== Alternatives ==
-And Rosta's Livagian uses another method which, though not a self-segregating morphology in the strict sense, partly serves the same purpose with less restriction in the phonological shape of words.  It requires a full knowledge of the lexicon to parse unambiguously, however.  The key is that no actual morpheme must look like a prefix or suffix substring of another actual morpheme.  So, for instance, if in a string "kesumalipe" you recognize "kesu" and "pe" as familiar morphemes, you know that this must be "kesu" followed by "ma li" or "mali" followed by "pe"; the fact that "kesu" is a real morpheme in a language meeting this criterion means that there cannot be another morpheme "kesuma" or "kesumali", and there can't be any morpheme like "lipe" or "malipe".  But if you have only learned the phonology of the language and don't know much vocabulary yet, you can't deduce the morpheme boundaries from the phonotactics of the word; you would have to start by looking up "k" in the lexicon, then "ke", then "kes", until you find "kesu"; then start looking for "m", "ma", etc.