tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Oct 30 06:34:16 1995
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Morphology and morphophonology
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Morphology and morphophonology
- Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 10:35:07 -0500
ghIthl peHruS:
>>>>
Natural Earth languages have morphology. Often made-up language lack
this feature, particularly those constructed from single-syllable elements.
I wish to praise Klingon for having the Noun Suffix {-oy}, without a glottal
stop at the beginning. In MO's own words, even in English we generally
pronounce words beginning with a vowel as if it had a minor glottal stop.
Basically, tlhInganpu' do not say puq 'oy' distinctly when they mean
puqoy.
They have to say pu-qoy. Klingon has morphology :)
<<<<
lugh Doch'e' Daja'bogh 'e' DaHech, 'ach mu''e' Daja'bogh jIQochnIS.
Morphology is, roughly speaking, the construction of words out of
(usually) meaningful elements called *morphemes*, which are often
smaller than words and cannot stand alone as words. One can draw an
analogy:
sentence : word : syntax ::
word : morpheme : morphology ::
morpheme : phoneme : phonology
The syntax of a language describes the way that that language
combines words to construct a sentence; and, similarly, the morphology
of a language describes the way that that language combines
morphemes to construct a word. And the phonology describes the way
the language combines *phonemes* (the smallest distinct units of sound
in the language) to construct a morpheme. [NOTE: These definitions are
very rough cuts. In particular, phonology also can apply at the level of a
syllable, a word, or a sentence, and morphology at the level of a
sentence.]
If Klingon didn't have the irregular morpheme "-oy", it would still have
morphology. Chapters 3 and 4 of TKD are entirely devoted to noun and
verb morphology, respectively, as are parts of chapters 5 (-DIch, -logh)
and 6 (-bogh).
The irregular form and behavior of "-oy" are part of *morphophonology*,
the interface of morphology with phonology. Klingon phonology (at the
word level) forbids a word to start with a vowel, and if it weren't for
"-oy" we would also be able to say that it forbids a morpheme to start
with a vowel. But we have the evidence of words like "vavoy" and
"be'nI'oy" to show that a Klingon morpheme can indeed start with a
vowel. If the morpheme is a suffix, as "-oy" is, the word-level restriction
is not violated. Okrand's conjecture that "-oy" would require an inserted
glottal stop (the "'" sound) if it followed a vowel-final noun -- e.g., ?po'oy
"dear morning" -- is based on the observation that no Klingon SYLLABLE
begins with a vowel.
- tlhIngan veQbeq marqem la'Hom
Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'!
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : [email protected]