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Re: [bpfk] camxes and syllabification in zi'evla

Jorge Llambías, On 25/10/2014 21:34:

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com <mailto:jjllambias@gmail.com>> wrote:

    Can we talk about "morphophonological syllables"? If yes, then assume this discussion is basically about morphophonological syllables rather than phonological ones.


"Morphogical syllables" (maybe renamed to something a little less susceptible to confusion) would be fine. My questions would then be what the rules are and why. The norms of language don't constrain morphophonological rules much, so they can be as weird and wacky as necessary. The rule you give below, CVC*, seems pretty straightforward.


Actually, that's not quite true. We do need to identify valid onsets
in order to determine words, but this discussion wasn't really about
onsets.


The question about onsets being whether CGV is a valid onset?

But "morphological onsets" are needed too, aren't they. E.g. /patrAma/ is two words /pa trAma/ whereas /partAma/ is one word, because of the rules for morpho-onsets.


I would have to agree that if the buffer vowel was real, all this
discussion would be mostly nonsensical. So I would say that the
buffer vowel is basically a myth. None of the phonological
constraints make much sense if there was a buffer vowel.


Well, today's morphophonology is yesterday's phonology (e.g. the vowel alternation in _sane--sanity_), so it makes sense diachronically but not synchronically. But for Lojban you don't look for diachronic explanations. (In Lojban too the actual explanation is of course quasi-diachronic, in that the complex constraints on 'clusters' were likely invented before the buffer vowel.)


I don't think I've ever heard anyone speak lojban with a buffer
vowel, and it would probably sound very confusing.


FWIW I used to use one (with erroneous allophony) in certain environments (but treated it as metrically invisible), in particular in environments z_C, m_C (to avoid confusion with mbC) and, for obstruent C, /C_./.


Without a buffer vowel, it does make sense to limit the amount of
consonant clustering that can occur. If there was a buffer vowel,
the morphophonological syllable could still be onset-nucleus-coda as
now, but with the coda allowed to contain as many consonants as you
wanted. That's not how my dialect of lojban works though.


In what way is it not how your dialect of Lojban works? It would categorize as valid some words that you categorize as invalid? Or would it insert word-boundaries differently? The latter seems more significant an objection than the former.

So anyway, do you advocate abolishing the buffer vowel? An alternative would be to insist that every licit phonological string has both a CV syllabification (with buffer vowels) and a resyllabification without buffer vowels. That alternative strikes me as needlessly complex, but as still preferable to abolishing the buffer vowel.

--And.


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