Morphology

From Ial

[edit] Forbidden syllables combinations

Juxtaposing of a syllable ending in n,m with another beginning with the same consonant is forbidden. E.g. kanna is not a valid combination, you cannot combine kan and na into kan-na, although kan or na is a valid syllables by itself. That is you can say nakan or kana. mm and nn are disallowed to avoid gemination (many speakers find lengthening consonants rather difficult).

[edit] Loans

Bringing foreign words into the vocabulary is forbidden, because we want the language to remain neutral.

[edit] Compound words

Every compound word must be made from meaningful constituents only, that is no affixes (prefixes or suffixs) without meaning should ever be used. No matter if it doesn't look pretty, we are not after beauty here. Compound words are made up simply by juxtaposition. If the result is ambiguous, constituent words will have to be changed (also when they are used alone) to eliminate any out-of-context ambiguity without sacrificing regularity. In other words, the language lexicon must incrementally be devised so that all word combinations that are part of the vocabulary (not any possible juxtaposition of words) are not morphologically ambiguous. That is any compound words can be split into his constituents words in only one way: AB cannot yield C and D, but only A and B, where AB,A,B,C,D are all words with a meaning by itself. Periodic automatic checks of the vocabulary will be perfromed to spot such problems.

Any compound word should be assigned a meaning as specific as given by its constituents, it does not matter how common or uncommon the meaning is. Regularity is more important. More words should be added, making the compound longer, to express more particular meanings. E.g. ItalianTeacher is ambiguous. ItalianLanguageTeacher and teacher from Italy are preferable. If a precise meaning cannot be captured exactly by a compound word, a unique word must be made. This is better than giving to a broad literal meaning of a compound word a rather specific one, which is not implied by all its constituents. The opposite should be avoided too, that is no specific literal meaning should be generalized into a broader one. Each compound word must be enough specific for its intended meaning but not more specific. When you define compound words, try to think to one or more paraphrases a language learner would use for a word he misses and try to choose the smallest subset of words from such paraphrases which can capture the meaning of the new compound word as exactly as possible. Check out your choice by asking different people to guess the exact meaning from the compound word, because this is what want our vocabulary to be: logical and a breeze to learn. For instance the English word doorbell is a better choice than the Italian campanello, which means small bell. Using smalldoorbell or alike would be redundant: there are no big bells on door. This wiki is the place to discuss various solutions adopted by natural languages, take the clue from them and select the best one, sticking to our goals of uniformity, simplicity and specificity. The goal is that our language users should be able to guess in vocabulary and to guess right most of the times. Do not forget it! For this very reason, irregulaties, changes or modifications of roots (in inflected forms, plurals, etc.) must be avoided, for how slight they are. There should be only one way to do the same thing, stick to the Occam's razor. The less a speaker has to memorize, the better it is. We want people to learn our language quickly, or it won't be adopted. Language beauty is not our goal, too. This is a mundane tool, not a piece of art, but that does not mean the whole thing will look ugly and dull, because even simplicity and regularity have their charm.