#free morphemes

[howdoesone]

How does one describe the process of compounding in morphology?

Compounding is a morphological process by which two or more individual words are combined to create a new word with its own distinct meaning. This process is used in many languages around the world, and it is an important aspect of word formation in morphology. In this article, we will describe the process of compounding in morphology, including its types, formation, and examples. Continue…

[mapsontheweb]

Pronunciation of the first syllable of the name of Europe in world languages

by cmzraxsn

hi, enough people liked my last map where I looked at the pronunciation of Bulgaria, so I've made one with the pronunciation of Europe. A lot less consensus this time! As usual, the caveats apply about linguistic maps that depict monolingual regions always being a bit dodgy. And sorry about too many colours. Feel free to add in other languages if you know them or give corrections (politely!).

Names of Europe fall into two main categories: those derived from the Greek Εὐρώπη via the Latin Europa, and those derived from the Chinese 歐洲 - however, the latter is an abbreviation of a loanword from Latin Europa.

Some African and Native American languages use alternate exonyms, however - the most common being the word Ulaya or Bulaya, in Bantu languages, derived from an Arabic word meaning "government" or "authority".

The one exception in the map is Vietnamese, because Châu Âu is derived from 歐洲 but the morpheme order is reversed! And shout out to Sranantongo which uses "Ropa", just getting rid of the first syllable altogether.

Map template is derived from the one used on linguisticmaps.tumblr.com (heavily edited), and the language data mainly comes from wikipedia and wiktionary. Some phonetic transcriptions may not match the colours exactly, I've tried to fit them to the closest where I can. Use your common sense and don't nitpick too closely, please.

[ranahan]

Had you talked about the whole eyn/te/haar thing at some point?

I don’t think so! I didn’t have anything prepared, and don’t have very strong opinions one way or another, but here are some thoughts anyway. Feel free to add more if you have more/other ideas.

So Mando’a has three articles: eyn, te, and haar. Articles in Mando’a don’t seem mandatory like the articles in e.g. English; you can drop them. So of course the question is when you should use them and when drop them then?

Eyn is the indefinite article, like English a/an. In creole languages (I headcanon that Mando’a is one), the indefinite article often develops from the numeral one in the lexicaliser language. I think that would make sense for Mando’a too, that eyn in (some, at least older) compound words would stand for “one.” So I headcanon that eyn is the numeral one in Classical Mando’a, which gives Modern Mando’a one more creole feature.

And then we have two definite articles… which obviously results in asking what’s the difference and how are they used?

Te is your ordinary definite article, like English the, I guess. Haar, I think, is etymologically related to e.g. haat, so the original meaning might be something like “the one (and only),” or “the true.” Haar might also be a part of some compounds, but it’s difficult to tell apart from e.g. haat because of Mando’a’s habit of eliding consonants when joining together morphemes.

Okay, that’s a cool enough a system, I guess. But you know my whole shtick with Mando’a grammar is taking the pieces and interpreting them in a way that is not like English. So I want to go a bit deeper, and in any case we have a couple of unanswered questions, so let’s look at some natural languages and different ways they use articles and see if anything catches.

Different kinds of articles in natural languages

Clearly Mando’a’s system is not just English’s indefinite/definite distinction, since Mando’a has a three different articles. But there are other kinds of articles as well.

There’s partitive article, which is a type of indefinite article used with mass nouns. Like “some water,” only instead of “some,” you’d have an indefinite article. Maybe you could also use eyn this way? Eyn pirun, some water/a water/a drink. (Eh, I have no idea how Mando’a handles mass/count nouns.)

If you can have an indefinite noun without an article, or you can specify an indefinite article, wouldn’t the latter be the equivalent of saying “some dude, I don’t know which,” which is another sense of “some.”

Obviously the two different senses of “some” happen to belong to the same word in English (but not necessarily in other languages). But I think many of the adoptees who would have contributed to Mando’a’s creolisation would have spoken Basic. And the other way a language can contribute to a creole is by replicating grammatical structures or senses of words. Now obviously we don’t want to recreate English senses all over because that would just create a complicated cipher for English. But it does compel me when I can do it in a way that produces an end result that is not like English, haha.

I like to imagine (that Traviss imagined that) there were a bunch of working class folks from the Northeast of the Galactic Republic, and a bunch of soldierly types, who got absorbed into the mando armies at some point during their Imperial days, and left behind some dialectal Basic words (yaim, birgaan, taabir, etc) and some specific ways of using words (which might be not much like the prestige dialect of Basic).

Some languages use the partitive article to refer to a part of something or a member of a group, but in Mando’a this kind of a meaning seems to already exist in the suffix -b/ab/eb (or -il in some fandom dialects).

Te reo Māori has a proper article, meaning the noun it refers to is a unique entity. (Oceanic languages btw have a pretty elaborate systems of possession and classification of nouns that defines how they are possessed.) The proper article might be used to refer to proper nouns (the Azores) or names.

And well hey, we seem to have an article which means “the true one,” so something like this might be a good fit. So maybe it ought to be Mand’alor haar Ani’la (not te Ani’la) and haar Yaim’ol (The Return, as in the historical movement)?

There’s negative article, which basically does the same job as English no in sentences like “no man can kill me.” Mando’a would probably just use the negative particle here though.

And then there’s zero article. So a language might make the same distinction as English does with a/the with no article (indefinite)/article (definite). English actually uses this for mass nouns. But I don’t think this is what’s going on with Mando’a, since it has three different articles which are apparently just not mandatory (i.e. the lack of article is not grammatically significant, just depends on context of the conversation).

The distinction between the two definite articles could be one of distance (proximate/distal; this/that/yonder), but I don’t think that’s what Mando’a does either. I mean I love this feature, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to exist in Mando’a.

And of course many languages have different articles for different noun classes (whether that’s masculine/feminine, or animate/inanimate, directly/indirectly possessed, count/mass nouns, or some other classification) and cases.

More ideas

One idea I like is that the distinction between eyn and te could be more about specificity than definiteness. So te could refer to a specific thing, whether it’s mentioned for the first time or not (hehe, more translation confusion!), and eyn could refer to any such thing. Oceanic languages do something like this, to the best of my understanding.

Te could also be used when speaking about general truths, or maybe general truths don’t require an article: Mando’ade draar digu. No article there.

Another idea I had at some point is that the articles could also be used sort of interchangeably with the demonstratives, so eyn could be translated as “some” or “any” and te as “this” or “that,” depending on context. So kind of like Finnish does: “anna mulle joku ase” vs. ”anna mulle se ase” (”give me some (any) weapon/that weapon”); more or less the same distinction as the specificity. Obviously Mando’a also has demonstratives, so this alone is not going to work.

One way I’ve been using te is in place of a possessive pronoun, when the owner is known from context. This avoids repeating the pronouns (kaysh te’habi be kaysh buy’ce) and feels a bit more natural to me (kaysh te’habi be te buy’ce). I stole this from Swedish.

Plurals? Maybe Mando’a uses the articles the same way regardless of whether they refer to a singular or plural. E.G. eyn jetiise would be “some jedi” and te jetiise would be “the jedi, those jedi, or that group of jedi.” Although of course it can make sense to restrict the article that means “one” to singular nouns, I kind of also like the idea that the demonstratives ibic/ibac can be both singular and plural (saw this somewhere on tumblr and didn’t write down where, ugh)—I think it would make sense to either have or not have the distinction but do it the same way for both articles and demonstratives.

And I kind of like the idea that in colloquial speech at least, te might get reduced to t’ in front of front vowels. T’eparav, the feasting; t’iviin, the speed.

tldr

Well, that’s a bunch of ideas. My gut feeling is I like the unspecific/specific distinction for eyn and te, the proper article for haar, and dropping the article for general truths and whenever the meaning is clear from context. So basically some/any (eyn), a specific one out of many (te), and a unique entity (haar). That feels about right. Although it would unfortunately mean retconning some established fandom practices, which I don’t like (I prefer to build around them, not over them whenever it makes sense to me).

Anyway, I’ll have to mull it over, and dig up some more stuff (do you know what you get when you search for “article”…), and come back to this some later day with a more coherent view. Hope this was at least a little like what you were asking for. If you have any better ideas/just different ones/thoughts/comments, please share!

P.s. your other question is excellent as well, I’ll answer it some other day when I have more time.

[blokkan-conlang]

hello. remember me?

so ive been away a long time. i started this blog before i started university and now im about to get my bachelor's in linguistics. now that ive reached the end of my course, i know so much more about linguistic theory and structures than when i started and my mind is overflowing with ideas. now that i have a bunch more free time, ive decided to start work on this project again, and that includes pretty much starting this blog fresh and redoing the entire language (not like i had much to begin with anyway) except for some words that have stuck.

some ideas and plans i have at the moment:

im renaming the language, havent decided what though. ive also redone with phonetic inventory

i want the language to feel block-buildy to reflect the nature of minecraft. therefore this language will be highly agglutinative (many morphemes per word) and will contain complex predication

there's 16 light verbs that will combine with ~32-64 coverbs (havent decided how many), resulting in a total of 512-1024 predicating elements

light verbs will contain tense prefixes as well as the subject suffix

coverbs with contain aspectual/modal prefixes as well as the object suffix

im planning on figuring out if i can have no adjectives in this language, because why not. adjectives will instead be expressed by be/have + [noun], e.g. "happy" = "have happiness". i havent fully decided yet though

there will be a rudimentary noun class system. animate (human/non-human), inanimate (wood, sand, stone, plant, water) and abstract. i havent fully fleshed this out just yet but it may be some kind of definite article situation.

there will be final-consonant mutation depending on the proceding phone -- inspired by the same process which occurs in the bretonic and celtic languages

pronouns are expressed as a clitic that occur as a suffix on verbs (how they will be conjugated), prepositions (to express "to me" or "for me", etc) and directional words ("toward me", away from me", etc). maybe more if i can find more room for them

a proprietive morpheme that will express "with" (much like an instrumental case) and a privative morpheme (without). this will also function like an archaic locative morpheme. e.g. "a bird is in the tree" will be something like "tree.PROP bird exist=3P.SG.ANIM"

anyway, thats what ive been thinking about for the past week. hope youre all well :]

[willowbilly]

Analytic/Isolating <--> Synthetic

In linguistics, morphology is how words are grammatically constructed; syntax is how phrases and sentences are grammatically constructed. A morpheme is the smallest possible linguistic unit that still carries meaning. The morphological typology of human languages is conceived as a spectrum between those that are analytic, with more morphologically simple words composed of fewer affixes and more free morphemes, and those languages that are synthetic, with more bound morphemes and therefore higher morphological complexity.

Synthetic morphosyntax expresses grammatical function through bound morphemes, attached to a root; this creates longer words. Analytic morphosyntax expresses grammatical function through free morphemes, unattached to a root; this creates shorter words. Isolating morphosyntax is sometimes distinguished from analytic as allowing no bound morphemes whatsoever. There is no documented natural language that is “purely” analytic, isolating, or synthetic.

The morphological processes of inflection are agglutinative, wherein affixes each inflect for a discrete unit of meaning, or fusional, wherein single affixes are inflected for multiple simultaneous grammatical categories. Inflection of synthetic and analytic languages may fall anywhere on the spectrum from agglutinative to fusional, or the spectrum from one to many grammatical categories per affix.

Agglutinative <--> Fusional

Polysynthetic languages are synthetic languages with highly productive usage of affixes that results in the creation of considerably long words, and whose inflection may be agglutinative or fusional.

Iñupiatun is a polysynthetic language with agglutinative inflection, whereas English is an analytic language with limited fusional inflection. Compare this Iñupiatun sentence to an English translation:

Qamutitaġuguuniaqtuŋa. | I will always be wanting to use the car.

Qamun is the noun root, with all of its affixed morphemes—the postbases +[t]aq+[s]uk+[s]uu+niaq- and the verb ending +tuŋa—being bound. This results in a single, more morphologically complex word that may serve as a full sentence unto itself, while the English sentence is composed of eight morphologically simple words that are 1-2 morphemes each, six words of which are free morphemes. As they are free morphemes, the words “to use” are able to stand freely alone, but their positions within the sentence are strictly determined by English syntax. Whereas the bound morpheme “+[t]aq-” is strictly bound into its position within that word by Iñupiatun morphology, since it must be affixed to the end of the noun so as to create the qamutitaq- “to drive or ride in a vehicle; to travel by car or truck” verb root, and it cannot appear standing on its own.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Useful free tools for writing.

More of the incidental tools that I find useful, regardless of how one usually writes that are often known in the writing community, but you might not know?

One Look dictionary

Reverse word look up. You know when you're getting stumped on a word you kinda know, but only can get the definition of, or you want to make sure your 3-word phrase can't be said more succinctly? Yeah, this resource should help. (The underline is a link)

Google Docs

I should note that after about 100K words, it starts to struggle. But it's good for editing, collab work, spreadsheets, and also keeping track of your previous drafts so if someone says, "But, but you plagiarized from me," you have a log saying you didn't, so you can say, "you likely took from me."

And so on.

Libre Office–because not everyone wants to deal with Google Docs or can afford Microsoft office. It also has a recovery function, so if it crashes, you can get your words back. (Microsoft Office often doesn't?)

Use it for formatting your manuscripts. For the editors out there, accept ODT format. This is absolutely free and sometimes it doesn't port well.

Rhyming dictionaries–yes, they exist. The slant rhyming is also useful. There are slant rhyming dictionaries too.

The almighty square bracket. []

To all of you discovery writers out there that can't afford Scrivener. This is the tool for you. You've written and dumped all this information into the text that shouldn't belong there, but you want to keep it. What do you do? You square bracket it.

If not that, there is also the curly bracket if you need a sub category. {

It's great for:

Editing notes.

Please expand this note to yourself.

Examine this phrase later because you moved on, but it doesn't sound right.

Cataloging important information you might need at a later date.

Info dumping that you want to break up.

Storing long descriptions you want to use elsewhere.

You're too lazy to catalog in your world building notes great information.

You have ADHD and some other idea has occurred to you, but it's totally off topic. Square bracket.

To avoid plagiarism 'cause you forgot you pulled a source.

If you're one of those super detailed people, you can also color code it. The reason is that both curly and square brackets almost never show up in manuscripts. <> sometimes does, but also often doesn't.

The best part is no matter your program, format, or keyboard, you have it.

Note that this doesn't work for Japanese as well, but Japanese also have access to {} which is why I noted it here.

Spreadsheets

You need to make a calendar for your planet and need the quick calculations.

You need to make a morpheme list for your mythical language.

You want to delineate gender quickly.

This usually comes with Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Office and Libre Office. But writers often (me included) forget they exist.

But they are useful for more than number crunching. And some writers use them for plotting too.

For Fantasy/SF writers: Donjon:

The whole website, but particularly the Fantasy Calendar maker is useful.

Google Search: Quotes.

You want to fact check a quote. Or you got distracted and forgot to put in the citation information.

To be or not to be

is horrible search for. So what you do is this: "To be or not to be."

And you might get Will Shakespeare.

BTW, Goodreads is a horrible horrible source for finding out where quotes came from. Make sure you have the actual page number/place it was said with the surrounding quotes.

Equally, the -[item] is also often useful when you're searching.

You're looking up say... Kimchi, and you want search results that don't have napa in it You would type "kimchi -napa"

You are researching... I hope, I hope.

Public domain books: Project Gutenberg

You need a back issues of Gustav Freytag's Dies Techniks des dramas.

You need the quote from Anne of Green Gables.

You want to check if this Winnie the Pooh quote is in the earlier or later works because of public domain issues.

You need to read The Art of War for the tenth time.

You need to read Machiavelli's The Prince, because you are writing politics and war.

This is the place to find it. Sometimes, sometimes it is public domain, but it's not in there.

Library

Libby (app), for example. Sign up for it. Get a library card and you'll save yourself money. Some countries don't have one, but for the ones that do, you can read print books and consume audiobooks at home.

Often self-pubbed books are on there too. If you have an amazon account then you can use the kindle app with it.

Sometimes you can also go to university libraries and though you can't check anything out, you can use their catalogs to look up things. You sometimes have to be there, but often they give links to free resources in their catalogs and might be easier to use than JSTOR. You don't have to be a student. Just be respectful of the people there, and try to put the books back where you found them. (usual library stuff).

This will save you going to Hawaii for the University of Hawaii, for example, because you know they have some awesome East Asian resources.

[moonmeg]

Studying English (literature and linguistics) sometimes leads to me analyzing my own writing. I sit there, reading scripts or fics and am like "haha lol that's an anaphora" or start dividing compound words into their components all "Yes this word is made of a bound morpheme and a free morpheme" or "does this sentence follow the phrase structure rule? Lemme analyze-"

S.O.S

[conlangcrab]

Another "inventing languages backwards" bullshit project.

I'd say that Aba'abe project is pretty much done for the first stage and I will return to it someday later, but meanwhile, followers, I present to you a different idea.

What if we did something similar, with a pre-generated onomasticon of sorts, but:

The words are longer.

There's some semblance of orthography, but no defined phonology.

We must assign meanings to words and then break down the morphology.

Say we have a word "Ansendir". We could give it a definition: "Oxbow lake". Now, we say that it's not just one morpheme, but three: "Ans", "en", "dir", which together (in some combination) mean (literally) "crescent-shaped lake".

WIP name for this right now is gonna be just that, Ansendir, and the only reference point will be an Awkwords setting preset (see under cut) and this post on @444namesplus. I will open a free-to-edit document if people seem interested enough.

a/e/i/u/y/o/á/é/ó/ý

k/n/s/h/r/g/l/m/w/f/p/v/b/t/d/z

n/r((r)i/u)

CV(N)/(C)VN

The [S] subpattern defines a singular syllable, so to generate a two-syllable word just put "SS" in the pattern field on the revived Awkwords site.

[strawberry-seal77]

sometimes I dont know what to say to people on tumblr.com so I send them an ask that could easily just be a post on its own. this is called a Free Morpheme

[windor-truffle]

is this a pun??? (aka Dolphin doesn't know how to read japanese)

ok i'm going to reveal myself now as an absolute monolingual ignoramus on a site full of people who fluently speak japanese but i think i might have accidentally taught myself something whilst translating the graces perfect guide and it's making me weirdly happy so allow me to be a language-acquiring toddler for a moment and overexplain what happened tonight:

so from the beginning of this translation project i was noticing some inconsistencies in how Google Translate approached the word used to describe Ephinea in relation to Fodra. "Star" is the english word it goes for the most, but sometimes satellite which seems more correct, and this bothered me because, well, Ephinea's not a star?? Not by scientific definitions anyway, I know this is a fantasy world but you can't live on a star, it's gas. But I chalked it up to odd translation quirks and moved on, until I accidentally got a few different translated lines thanks to part of the text being cut off the first time: "A satellite of the planet Fódlan" vs "Mamoru of Planet Fódlan" vs. "guard of the planet Fodlan." The original text is, I believe, エフィネア 【[ 文 明 ・ 文 化 】 惑星 フォ ドラの衛. Anyone who can read this probably can tell exactly where I'm going but I had to learn this so please be nice to me ;_;

The romaji caught my attention here because even with my limited knowledge I was like. wait a minute mamoru I know that word. A certain dumbass won't stop saying it. Is it possible that mamoru is somehow related to the word used to define Ephinea?? Is this a pun???? And upon some isolating of characters and a reference to JapanDict I learned 3 things:

The character 星 is the one google translate likes to define as "star."

The character 衛 is the one google translate told me was mamoru, and wouldn't translate it into "guard" until I allowed it to detect Chinese, so I assume that means it's kanji? (I'm sorry I know fuck all about reading in Japanese). By itself it didn't show up in JapanDict.

But you know what DID show up? 衛星, translated to satellite or moon. It seems the characters for "mamoru" and "star," when put together, become the word for the world of Ephinea, "satellite." The themes of the game are baked into the world itself ;_;

I had to stop myself here for a minute though because like I've said so much already, I don't know the first thing about how character based languages work. Maybe this isn't a big deal at all, maybe this is just equivalent to an ESL learner getting worked up about the morpheme "cat" existing inside the word "catastrophe" when the actual root and definition of that word has nothing to do with cats.

But the thing is, context matters??? If there was a story in which feline-based disasters were happening and it was being described as a catastrophe, that would almost certainly be intentional by the writers and immediately understood as a pun by fluent speakers, probably to their chagrin. But maybe to the ESL learner with juuuust enough knowledge to understand that there is a pun, it becomes immediately delightful.

Anyway, for now I'm gonna assume that this is intentional because it seems like there are many other words for "moon" or "satellite" in Japanese and they chose the one that uses 衛. Someone who actually knows anything feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I'd really rather have my bubble burst but learn something than go around with false conclusions I made up because of confirmation bias and a foolish attempt at teaching myself a foreign language without any actual speakers around to consult.

But in conclusion,

[pachycephalopod]

"Tess of the Road" lives rent-free in my brain. Much lower-stakes in a lot of ways than the first duology it's the sequel to, but feels more meaningful? All the books have extremely leisurely pacing for most of their length, which honestly I love. It's great. Sometimes it's frustrating because a plot-important thread has been brought up, often several times, that the protagonist just kinda ignores until the action ramps up, but generally the slow pace and focus on character is 10/10. But gosh I can't stop thinking about the quigutl morpheme "-utl" which is attached to a word to make it mean both itself and it's opposite at the same time, and I keep finding contexts where such a particle would be so useful

[space-ninja-fashion-show]

All five languages in the game are just English slightly to the left, which makes them easy to generate but also just bad to deal with from a worldbuilding standpoint, so I've simply decided that I'm going to ignore that

Which means that everything is free game and I'm having a good time

(This isn't a comprehensive post on anything but! Here are some Thoughts on Orokin and Corpus for starters if anyone is interested in Pure Linguistic Nonsense)

The official source attributes what we know as the Orokin script* to Tenno culture (going as far as calling it Tennobet) but that source is from 2014, before most of the lore of the game was established at all. Also Orokin script now appears outside of Tenno spaces - namely in various void buildings, and on the Zariman insignia, which predates Tenno culture as a whole

*I'm calling it a script, bc it's technically an abugida, not an alphabet, since it treats consonant-vowel pairs as units and writes vowels over consonants akin to diacritics (accents and whatnot) instead of treating them as equal

So! I consider this script to have been the one in use by Orokin, instead of being Tenno-exclusive

Disconnecting the whole thing from English means i can do whatever i want vis a vis morphological typology (sorting languages based on how they form words) and I very excitedly landed on synthetic, occasionally polysynthetic for Orokin. Synthetic means that they glued together their words from a whole bunch of bits that didn't only mean one specific thing (e.g. a suffix didn't just mean "plural", it meant "plural, inanimate, belongs to the speaker" and if you wanted to instead say "plural, animate, belongs to the speaker" you'd need a completely different suffix). Occasionally polysynthetic means they sometimes took this to the level where entire thoughts could be compressed into a single word, and the suffixes used would sometimes affect each other as well

Reason? Some of the (if not the) only Orokin words with exact translations we have are the new names the Entrati family give each other. They all have their poetic meanings expressed as sentences in English and yet end up as only 2-3 syllables, which really fits with a synthetic/polysynthetic language to me

(You could make the argument that these were actually established names and they're all just quoting etymology, but that doesn't sit well with me for multiple reasons)

As for Corpus!

They trace their roots back to the Orokin, but that's, y'know, thousands of years ago, so A Lot Has Changed. Most of the Corpus language has been artificially made analytic (meaning you don't slap affixes onto words most of the time but simply line them up one after the other) for sake of…let's call it ease

But they still retain traces from the old Orokin ways! They have quite a few root words that can still be traced back to their Orokin counterparts. With how obsessed they are with Orokin shit, I imagine Corpus-Orokin Comparative Linguistics is a well-researched field. Interestingly, despite being mostly analytic, Corpus retains some odd bits of polysynthetic behaviour without joining their morphemes together at all! Meaning sometimes you have a word that means "spaceship" and then you add a separate word that means "<- whatever that inanimate thing is is owned by the speaker", and suddenly the "spaceship" word has taken a completely different form! It's a bit of a mess

(I'm aware that this is also a thing that exists. Russian does it, kinda! But I don't know where Russian gets it from, and I'm telling this this way bc I do know where Corpus gets it from)

There's also some words that have held onto their Orokin roots so much that they still behave as synthetic/polysynthetic! Notably, Orokin has affixes entirely unique to specific words denoting high social class (to use them for any other words would've been a grave insult, and to use anything else for these high class words would've been the same. Unless you're high class yourself, then the first instance can be a joke). One such word has evolved into the Corpus word for "CEO" and retains synthetic behaviour with affixes entirely unique to it

The language has been carefully trimmed to become more impersonal. Not entirely of course, but the average Corpus is a lot more sparing with any words and phrases that aren't objective. They also rarely use diminutives and shortenings of any kind

We only have one example of handwritten Corpus (the John Prodman poster), which is such a neat thing to have! But the Corpus alphabet is clanky as hell to handwrite and I refuse to believe that even in an age of holo-tablets and combat-magic humans have abandoned pen and paper entirely

So how is Corpus handwritten? In shorthand! Shorthands are writing systems (not necessarily alphabets) made to be written as fast as speech or thought, and are usually Very simplified and contain many abbreviations (both official and personal) to achieve this. Corpus handwrite pretty much exclusively in shorthand - handwriting their standard, printed alphabet is more akin to trying to mimic a specific font or do calligraphy if you were to do the same in English. While widely used, shorthand text is considered unprofessional and private, and is overall something that a lot of non-Corpus aren't even aware exists (hence the John Prodman signature mimicking the standard alphabet as well. You want that shit to look nice and be legible)

Okay I'm gonna go rest now, thank you for your time

[lwmessiah]

Readerly Exploration #3

October 23, 2023

Mesmer (2019), Chapter 1, "Know the Code: Teacher’s Reference on How English Works”

Big Takeaways

Chapter 1: Gaining an understanding and recognizing the English system of writing.

Nugget

Something that stood out to me was how our speech sounds to those unfamiliar with the English language. We tend to blend words and sounds together when we are speaking making it hard for people to understand especially children. The text gave an interesting visual of how our language sounds making me reflect on my speech, especially as I begin working on literacy interventions.

Exploration

For my exploration this week I decided to work through the first chapter and write down important definitions that stood out and would be useful in the future as I begin teaching in the classroom.

Grapheme: a letter or group of letters that represent a phoneme.

Word: single element of meaning with a specific function.

Syllable: a word or word part with at least one vowel, made with one push of breath.

Onset/ rime: consonant sounds that come before a vowel.

Diphthongs: the sound changes quality in the middle of the sound (for example Noise, Shout).

Free morphemes: units that can stand independently.

Bound morphemes: word parts added to the free morphemes.

[iamraque]

Hey guy's!!!

You might be wondering about what is Word formation processes and how to use it, So Today, We will discover and discussed about What is Word formation processes and What are it's types.

Word formation processes in morphology

Definition

Word Formation Process (also called Morphological Process) is a means by which new words are produced either by modification of existing words or by complete innovation, which in turn become a part of the language.

Types of Word Formation Processes

Different types of word formation processes are employed to create new words. However, all word formation processes basically bring either inflectional or derivational changes. Therefore, inflection (also called inflexion) and derivation are the two core processes of word formation. Inflection differs from derivation to the following extent:

The major word formation processes include but are not limited to the following:

Affixation

It is a word formation process wherein an affix is attached to a root (also called stem; base) to form a new word. A root is a free morpheme (also called unbound morpheme) that can appear alone. On the other hand, an Affix is a bound morpheme which never occurs by itself, but is always attached to some free morpheme and can be either inflectional or derivational. An Inflectional affix modifies the form/grammatical category of a word, i.e., tense, person, number, gender, case, etc. For example: rat → rats. Contrariwise, a derivational affix modifies the parts of speech of the root, while leaving the grammatical category unchanged. In this way, there is a change of meaning of the root. For example: write → writer.

Conversion

This refers to the change of function or parts of speech of a word without adding an affix. Conversion is also called zero derivation or null derivation since the functional change is brought about by supplementing an invisible affix. Sometimes it is also called functional shift. Typically conversion is made from “noun to verb” and from “verb to noun”. Less frequently, conversion is also done from “adjective to verb” and “adjective to noun”.

For instance:

Back-formation

Back-formation is a morphological process in which new word is created by extracting affixes from another word. In this way, it is the reverse of affixation, in which affixes are added. Back-formation is also different from clipping since it brings a change in the parts of speech or the word's meaning. For example: the noun insertion has been back-formed into verb insert by removing the suffix ion.

Clipping

As the name suggests, clipping is the word formation process in which a word is reduced to a shorter form. With a sharp contrast to back-formation, clipping keeps the original word meaning intact. These words are very common in everyday speech. For instance: lab is the clipped form of laboratory. . There are four types of clippings:

Compounding

Also called composition, by this process two or more than two words are combined together to create a single word, having a single idea and function. In English, there are compound nouns, compound adjectives, and compound verbs. Customarily compound words are spelt as a single word, or as two or more hyphenated words, and even as two or more separate words.

For example:

-life + style → lifestyle

-mother + in + law → mother-in-law

-shopping + mall → shopping mall

There are no specific rules for hyphenated compounds. Generally, some new and original compound nouns are hyphenated, but the hyphen is ignored when they become more familiar. However, there are some compound adjectives that are always hyphenated. For instance: state-of-the-art. The hyphen is often retained when two vowels come together, such as: Co-operation. Hyphens are often used to tell the ages of people and things, for example: 10-year-old. The general rule is that words are combined with hyphens to avoid confusion.

Borrowing

This refers to the words adopted from other languages. There are two types of borrowings:

Coinage

Also called invention, is a morphological process by which new words are invented. Sometimes popular trademark names of various products are adopted by people so extensively that they ultimately become the everyday words of language.

For example:

Heroin

Aspirin

Escalator

Xerox

Kerosene

Nylon

Band-Aid

Vaseline

Margarine

Note: some words are being invented due to rapid cultural changes and the spread of information technology, mass media, internet, etc.

For example:

Google

Blog

Hotspot

Netbook

Tablet

Tweet

Emoticon

Smartphone

Blending

Blending (also called portmanteau) is a morphological process in which the parts of two or more words are combined together to form a new word. Usually, the parts consist of the beginning of one word and the end of the other word(s). Typically, the meaning of the blended word reverberates with the meanings of the original words.

For example:

breakfast + lunch → brunch

motor+hotel → motel

However, blending should not be confused with compounding, which combines two words without truncation of parts of the roots of the blended words.

Acronyms

These words are formed with the initial letters or each of the major parts of a word or a longer phrase. With a few exceptions, acronyms are usually capitalized. Some linguists confuse acronyms with initialisms, which are also abbreviations formed in the similar manner as the former. In essence, there is a sharp difference between the two. In language, an acronym is pronounced as a single word rather than just a sequence of individual letters, which is characteristic of initialisms.

For example:

Reduplication

Reduplication (also called cloning; doubling; duplication; repetition; tautonym) is a word formation process in which a new word is created by repeating all or part of a root or a stem, often with a change of vowel or initial consonant. Reduplication is not a major means of creating lexemes in English, but it is perhaps the most unusual one. Based on their usage, the techniques of reduplication could be classified in the following manner:

Repetition without Change: bye-bye, tick-tick

Rhyming Reduplication: ding-dong, super-duper, bow-wow

Repetition with Change of Vowel: tiptop, chitchat, flip-flop, ping-pong, dilly-dally, wishy-washy

Repetition with Change of Initial Consonant: teeny-weeny.

I hope you learn something new today, thankyou!!

References

“English Word Formation Processes.” Really Learn English. 2016. Really-Learn-English.com.

14 July 2016 <http://www.really-learn-english.com/word-formation-processes.html>.

“Inflection.” Wikipedia. 2016. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 14 July 2016

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection>.

“Morphological Derivation.” Wikipedia. 2016. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 14 July 2016

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation>.

Yule, George. The Study of Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 1996.

“Word Formation.” Wikipedia. 2016. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 14 July 2016

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_formation>.

[nightguide]

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY 1: a HSJ element to use and compare: follow ons

Harper: you're made to appeal to lie. that's your cue

P. 358

ERRORS AT PHONETIC FEATURES: you're not allowed to cry over your works in joy during interviews. like it pays to secure everything by had if there isn't anything you can do to support your work via morality, you don't even have a consistent story to tell if you have liquid bigger than you that it's their problem to clean up after you, your reasons to oblige is matters outside the personal for a make believe solution ongoing ideals with where you continue with space you sell than appealing you to meet the eye than a thought alone to hinder your process of being recognised than the latter (a necessary reason to own earth)

ERRORS AT SYLLABLES: why is where to you that is convenient than 'ooo, pretty' existing, channelling that into your work makes you too independent for your own good, so you like partnership with space that does not occur to you that often but are remarkable at sources convenient to your worldly interests (money blinds the eye), you have no interest in thought processes whatsoever than being blind to the city they (latter opinion) created to you than you utilising the world for your experience as a viewer. abolish cringe viewing

ERRORS OF STRESS (WITH THE STRESSED SYLLABLE GIVEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS): you're broken on the inside seeing them all struggle with a faint heart due to the toxicity of the ways they grew up meaning nothing to you but a mother remotely not there for them except themselves (familiarity) so why is space so demeaning to you than your reasons to lose into interests (female) or to make yourself seen with your now new partner now socialite beginning to free themselves from an ableism situation in their own household via one hated heart to trade to think better of

ERRORS OF WORD SELECTION: you clarify that responsibility thinking than you believing who you are that will support your idea in thinking (HSJ's upbringing by teacher association) thoughts battle your rights to enter a conference room of a university of your own thinking (ideas to change the world) and upon meeting me (an idealist of thought process) is an artist worth valuing for than notioning me to work for your petty little crimes (sexual evidence proved to bits of hate in her heart knowing you: her husband is not present yet but father is); so how and why are you moving in with me (social-space) than careening the latter of working alone abroad because your works are now too securely understood to the eye but so barren from mind-thought reasoning that you believe in change much stronger than she is to you by work of her own study (the blog you're reading right now)

ERRORS AT MORPHEMES: you're at reason with everything but yourself, (a music video director) is now looking at the worst of (you can name many that would have had your grateful eye but there is no such chance you missed at living for) so you're ignorant over men who have had the chance to imitate value by selling porn over women in the music industry available to your vices to make-do with why you're reasoning with them (social polarity)

ERRORS AT PHRASES: you're at home making sure what you need isn't there for you but you have a great skill in liking everything that is not you in the end, you're making a world too heartbreaking for someone else to live under your schemes of interest via versatility of the songwriters natural reason with the singer (often separate) but this is not you to work with but someone else (sculptor, designer, maker etc. works outside of the music scene too often) to be that judge of great polarity to you by forceful intervention (Eliasson is now a lecturer alongside Aitken who i have introduced to by reason: they knew my keen eye to direct a music video is because i did not know how to live but the arts scene take me everywhere with cruel kindness and sincerity with reason, feel free to talk to the British Arts Scene)

SEMANTIC AND PHONOLOGICAL WORD ERRORS: you make do with your history goes in 9's (massive sign that your life breaks down) this is not numerology or some sect of interest that makes you grind your gears but you have an affinite reasons to live and make do by you being you, there is no red-lines in works you're publishing online or to your crowd of interest that makes you forgive the latter of the scenes in desperation, forget that. you're going to die by nazar and the screen is your last chance, what you do matters, that is now Aitken's hand to intrude if not mine (women don't kill).

ERRORS AT MORPHOLOGICAL COMPLEX WORDS: you have a meter in your bones that changes your level of hate everywhere but now you're a maker, McKinley high is going to evolve and nostalgia is purely your enemy you're not looking for a heartbreak to change you, but you're amplifying words you used to use to drop 'placeholder words', you're scared to use your brain too much that even social presence defies your personality that all you ever do is sleep for it (your language) to understand that by heartbreak to use than to escape the means to believe (which is why you hate using 'placeholder words' to advantage someone in a race you'll never win: your discography back at 'her' or to a guy, you're reasoning with time because you never were meant to carry on except her, but you're scared of the BAS to use you as a product in their means to evolve the university now to see everybody than just you, then what actually is you, you're scared to forget the scenes in forgiving time backwards to a man but to a woman, your erotic identity is so severely adorned that your sisterhood (faith) wears you right back and it takes social thought of you to keep on going because of one life charity events (actually true) take over your system by TV personality alone (feel free to talk to Jason about that)

LEXICAL SELECTION ERROR: you hate being thought out of that reason after you become famous, not that you hate the 'one song you skipped that felt personal to you' but you don't like what you made of yourself (your fanbase) likely, someone with a bigger vision of the universe (HSJ) will see that and makes you fight for your rights to be (karmic personalities at McKinley)

EXCHANGE ERROR: you're in a multiverse of your own fuckery (you a villain elsewhere) now justify your means and let that horrible thing in your head die (you'll never die but that is the thing, you die in fantasy, you die in reality, but nobody will show up to your funeral) keep that in mind before looking at Eliasson's artwork in horror: just read that first before making that stupid mistake of skimming it for the 'ooo, pretty', you the fckin problem of society right there

[ijosijen]

the strictest feature of my word order seems to be the level of privilege that constituents get when it comes to being able to remain attached to their root during movements. higher privilege means more relevancy to the root, but is punished by high rigidness in syntax.

it generally seems to be based on how "large" the constituent is, on average? i know that big constituent = looser sounds tautological, but i'm talking more about average size of that constituent type than pure size as in morpheme count.

the most privileged class are adverbs. or rather the adverb? adverbs are a closed class, there's like ten of them. several adverbs are mutually exclusive with others. they always have a strict order relative to one another. they will follow their root noun or verb religiously, acting more like prefixes than modifying particles.

though there are of course exceptions. tau behaves like an adverb with verbs, and is mutually exclusive with adverbial si. Yet with nouns, that exclusivity no longer applies, and it only needs to obey looser adjectival placement rules.

adjectives on nouns are almost adverbial? they're a much freer class, in terms of being open and also their free orders relative to each other, deferring only to lexicalised compounds and focus-marking. but when it comes time to move the subject into a relative clause, they'll follow. or rather the entire RC will shift into post-position? end result is the same. the noun and adjectives did one thing, the RC the other.

once you get up into proper constituents, though, headed by clausals? there's like 3 rules. but even they're more like guidelines. and after all that? all bets are off. these things are shuffling as if party rock anthem is playing. only in strict situations, to be fair, but said "strict situations" are at this point often just as dependent on the semantics of the constituents as they are anything syntactic.

it's almost free word order! if you consider large compound constituents words, of course. high gavellian does. sometimes.

and then sentences can come in pretty much whatever order you want. as long as you're coherent, ig, but syntax no care about "coherency" of statement.