Hallo!

On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:06:01 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

>  Darn it - this thread would come in a week when I was
>  particularly busy!   ;)
>
>  Now, hopefully, I can catch up. IME describing something as
>  "possibly the simplest possible" is simply asking to be
>  proved wrong. 'Simplicity' strikes me as one of those terms
>  like 'ease of learning' that get bandied about in certain
>  conlang contexts (usually IME among auxlangers) and about
>  which no one agrees     ;)

Indeed.  One should always be careful with such superlatives
- it is more like advertising than a useful description.

>  [...]
>
>  But, as I see it, the one possible drawback of these schemes
>  that depend on a change of vowel is that monosyllabic
>  morphemes are not possible.

Indeed.  And that makes them awkward.  While I can live with a
language where each *lexical* morpheme is at least 2 syllables
long, *grammatical* morphemes ought to be as short as possible,
and anything above one syllable is too much.  In Old Albic, I
have lots of grammatical morphemes (and even a few verb roots!)
that are just one *phoneme* long (and most lexical roots are
one syllable).

>  On 10/09/2010 16:53, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>  [snip]
>   >>  I can't imagine a simpler system than that.
>   >
>   >  How about what I use in X-3? All morphemes are exactly
>   >  one phoneme long. Of course, the language is
>   >  oligosynthetic ...
>
>  ..and in my 'Experimental Conlang' each morpheme is exactly
>  one syllable long and all the syllables are CV     :)
>
>  That surely has to be simpler!

Indeed.

>  Of course, as the language also has to oligosynthetic as it
>  has only 64 morphemes. (I'm rapidly going off the idea of
>  experimental oligosynthetic language and may revert to my
>  original idea of an experimental loglang).

The I Ging was a too restrictive set of meanings, I guess?
I still feel that oligosynthetic languages do not really work,
and that is part of the reason why my work with X-3/Quetech
is utterly stuck (another part of the reason is that I have
enough other projects with higher priority: Old Albic, a web
magazine dealing with sustainable living, writing songs for a
band I am going to try to found next year, and yet others).

--
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