Anthony I meant to ask you: what dictionary software are you using and on
what platform? Perhaps one I can succeed to bend my head around!

/bpj
Den 20 apr 2014 06:07 skrev "Anthony Miles" <[log in to unmask]>:

> >Assuming the missionaries were literate, why would they not coin
> _patisa_? (or if >there's some kind of vowel harmony, _patesa_)?
>
> AM: /ti/ is not a valid syllable in Siye, so they can't use /patisa/ - it
> would have to be /pakisa/.
>
> >Ah, beautifully assembled, then! I love me a language with bipartite
> stems (cf. my own Sabasasaj).
>
> Honestly, I could use some help with effective glossing of the language –
> especially the bipartite stems. How would you handle a verb such as
> /eleyemlokatunu/ 'I have not decided to watch them'. /yem/ is a root that
> has to do with eating; it is therefore transitive, which means that you
> need to use both subject and object prefixes, /yem/ is the perfective root,
> which means that the full verb requires the perfective aspect /nu/, which
> is also negative and realis. /lo/ is the grammatical number suffix, but
> since the aspect of the verb is perfective and transitive, the number must
> agree with the object rather than the subject. /ka/ is a suffix that means
> 'to have resolved to' and requires the perfective. /tu/ is a directional
> suffix which changes /yem/ 'see' to /yem-tu/ 'watch'.
>
> >Oh, that wasn't my intent in saying that. Short examples are fine.
>
> >I can, though, name a thing or two that would help me understand your
> examples: a >big one is horizontally aligning the morphemes with their
> glosses in the >interlinear. Or if that's too much work, then the poor
> man's version would be to >make the dashes separating morpheme glosses more
> salient somehow. Otherwise it's >hard to pick out the correspondence
> between morpheme and gloss, and if I want to >know what a given morpheme is
> I have to just count dashes into it, which is >errorprone.
>
> I'll be more careful about lining up the morphemes with the glosses, but I
> can't promise the line-up will survive the mail filter. I've been reading
> articles on Bantu languages – I wonder if I could borrow some of the
> concord marking abbreviations.
>
> >>You say there are no final consonants -- other than /m/ I take it?
>
> >IIRC, written coda /m/ is actually the marker of vowel nasalisation, not
> a coda consonant. -- ah, yeah,
> http://www.frathwiki.com/Siye#Phonology_and_Orthography .
> Sorry about not making that clear. The nasalization also affects vowel
> quality – essentially the oral vowels are +ATR and the nasal vowels -ATR,
> except for /a/ and /am/, which are generally +ATR. But they still don't
> have vowel harmony.
>
> >>Also why would final syllables homophonous with a number suffix be a
> >>problem? Most languages tolerate that kind of small ambiguities,
> especially
> >>if the suffix in question has to be added anyway. Take the Swedish word
> >>_öken_ 'desert': it looks like the definite form of a common noun _*ök_,
> >>yet it is indefinite, its definite form being _öknen_.
>
> >This puzzles me too.
>
> >But! But then I saw in the Frath documentation
> > http://www.frathwiki.com/Siye_Verbal_Morphology#Grammatical_Number
> >that the number suffixes are obligatory, and none of them is zero! This
> is the best >possible situation for _avoiding_ confusion between stem-final
> syllables and number >suffix: if there is just one syllable with the form
> of a number suffix, it must be a >number suffix and so cannot be part of
> the stem; if there are two such syllables, >the first one must be part of
> the stem and the second the number suffix (unless the >latter one could be
> taken for some suffix of class even further right). That is, >this is the
> _worst_ possible situation for the posited reanalysis to take place. So
> >now I agree with Benct again, I don't see how there's a problem with those
> final >syllables.
>
> >Even if the fiction-internal basis for this rule is some kind of
> Strunk-and-Whitish >false overgeneralisation on the part of whoever
> legislate correct Siye grammar, that >still doesn't account for where the
> seed of the rule came from. I've never heard >even the kookiest pedants
> say there's something wrong with words like _öken_.
> The Guild of Scholars would heartily approve of Strunk and White (which
> may well exist in some lawyer-friendly form in the EJL cosm, where the Mars
> of the Simayamka resides). They would, however, say that the good messieurs
> were not sufficiently prescriptivists.
>
> This is a product of conlang overdesign – what with coordinating the
> aspect, transitivity, directionality, grammatical number concord, and
> converbal elements, the last thing I wanted to think about was where the
> verb root ended. Since I was not marking stress and one of the converbal
> suffixes /ka/ is homophonous with the pantic number suffix /ka/, I decided
> that verbal roots could not end in a syllable homophonous with any of the
> number suffixes. (/ka/ is the only such suffix, however).
>
> Now I do have a stress pattern for verbs: the first syllable of the verb
> root takes primary stress, and the first syllable of any suffix can take a
> secondary stress. There may be no more than two unstressed syllables
> between stressed syllables. This means that the number suffix is always
> stressed, except after monosyllabic verb roots. So there's no reason not to
> lift the Great Syllable Embargo. But I'm still not writing the stress.
> Epenesakamsotekatumumo? (Would the two of you like to write it?)
>
> e-pe-'nesakam-”so-”teka-”tu-”me-”umo
>
> But we can't have adjacent stressed syllables, and the vowels of /me/ and
> /ukumo/ contract together. So we get:
>
> e-pe-'nesakam-”soteka-”tumumo
>