Hallo conlangers!

On Saturday 04 August 2012 18:19:06 Jim Henry wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 4:30 AM, neo gu <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > On Sat, 4 Aug 2012 08:20:47 +0100, R A Brown <[log in to unmask]>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > Yes, [@] and [?], the latter occuring only between written vowels or
> > initially before a written vowel. Phonotactics should dictate when [@]
> > occurs.
> 
> More generally, you can omit, in writing, any phoneme whose occurrence
> is always predictable by context.

Yes.
 
> >>> • fusion
> >>
> >>Yes - but can you be more specific?
> >>
> > I was hoping someone else would expand on this.
> 
> If you mark the combination of two or more grammatical categories with
> a single morpheme, instead of several different ones, that gets you
> some concision.  It might, however, work against concision in other
> areas, as where you're talking about omitting inflections when the
> value for a given category is obvious from context.  For instance, if
> you mark tense, aspect and mood with fusional affixes, then whenever
> you want to mark one of them, you might have to mark all three, even
> if the values for two of them are obvious in a given context.

Right.  Agglutinating languages in which the unmarked member
of a category is marked zero and can be used whenever the
value is obvious from content (e.g., no plural marker is
necessary if a numeral or a quantifier like 'many' is present)
could be more concise than fusional languages, I think.
 
> > No, not like a loglang; using different parts of speech means that a
> > given suffix can have different interpretations depending on part of
> > speech, e.g. -a could be absolutive case on a noun (assuming case is
> > useful) but past tense on a verb. (But I've forgotten what "arity"
> > means.)
> 
> "arity" is a back formation from "binary" (etc.), meaning the number
> of arguments that a function takes, or the number of other words that
> a word modifies.  So an intransitive verb or an adjective is unary, a
> transitive verb is binary, a ditransitive verb is trinary (or
> ternary?), etc., and an impersonal verb is 0-ary -- I'm not sure how
> that's pronounced, maybe "nullary"?

I think "nullary" works quite well.

>       I expect nouns and pronouns may
> be considered 0-ary too, but probably Logan or Alex or someone can
> expand on that.

I am not a loglanger (nor am I Logan or Alex), but I think most
nouns are unary predicate symbols (e.g., 'X is a bear').  Some
are even binary, such as kinship terms ('X is the father of Y').

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