> [mailto:sasxsek@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of David Marjanovic

> > The suffixes are there as building blocks. To keep the
> > vocabulary as small as possible, the words will need to have
> > broader meanings. Because of those broad meanings, there is
a
> > need for some way to refine the meanings without being too
> > verbose so the suffixes are there.
>
> But... if you use vocabulary instead of grammar, I think you
> make a net
> bargain, at least concerning ease of learning.
>
> >> Also, remember the general warnings about agglutinative
> >> conlangs:
>
> My main point was that the meanings of -IB/-IF could over
> time become as
> unpredictable as those of the E-o <-igi>/<-i^gi>.

I know, and that's why I orginally avoided the situation but I
needed to make the derivatives distinguishable across the board.
The use of "-if" for both does work in English but only because
we have a bloated vocabulary to pick up differences in the uses
of equivalent suffixes like "-ify" (where -IF came from in the
first place) or "-ize" which have similarly have dual uses based
upon whether they are used transitively or not. I've already
seen where one person has mistaken this for some type of
ergative structure which it wasn't intended to be.

> > but don't want to have to resort to adding more
> > lexicals to get the job done if it can be avoided.
>
> I think a word is easier to learn than a suffix.

It's only one more suffix, of which there aren't that many to
start with and it ultimately could save the need for hundred or
thousands of other words. If it's really an issue then a
student could just learn whole words like "sapife" for "teacher"
and "sapibe" for student.

> > Anyway, for the most part, the Mandarin idea of dropping
> > unneccesary morphemes will apply to Sasxsek in most cases.
If
> > you want to say something like "teach person" it would be
> > alright as long as contextually it's known whether this is
the
> > person doin the teaching or the person being taught,
>
> Easy: the latter is the learn-person. Which, in fact, it is
> in Mandarin,
> almost literally: xue2sheng -- xue2 = learn, sheng1 = hm...
"born" or
> something... apparently expressing that the person is young
> for honorific
> purposes.

The problem with something like "learn person" is that we are
dealing with a lot of different background too. "learn person"
could be interpreted as "the person I learn from" or "a person
who learns" without any marker to make the role clear.
Therefore -IB and -IF now play out two ways with a word like
"sap" to mean "to come to know (=learn)" and "to cause to know
(=teach, inform)". This economizes on roots because from "know"
we can derive "teach" and "learn". We also now have "mat" (=to
be dead), "matif" (=to kill) and "matib" (=to die) which also
would have been confused without distinct endings.

I do agree that we don't want to flood the system with suffixes
because there is a need to learn when and how each one
functions. I'm more concerned with explaining "-o" than any of
the others. The closest I've found in any natural language
would be the Chinese "-zi" suffix, but the usage still isn't
exactly parallel, and in English it could be "-age, -oid" and
even be "one" as in "kizo" (="red one").

> > The affricates /tS/=<c> and /dZ/=<j> have already been
added.
> > /ts/ and /dz/ would be considered clusters
>
> I only talk about pronunciation. If /ts~dz/ will be allowed,
> /tS~dZ/ should
> not be allowed in the same places within a word, because
> plenty of people
> would pronounce them the same. That's all.

That's what the plan was, so it looks like we were saying the
same thing.


> > It probably will happen. I'm stalling because it's low on
the
> > priority list right now. These changes do take quite a bit
of
> > work with all the documentation that needs to be updated.
There
> > have been many changes in the past 2-3 weeks so there's been
a
> > lot to change.
>
> Sorry. Do take your time.

No worries. A period of unemployment that ran much longer than
expected gave me some extra time to devote to this, but now I'm
back to working again so expect slower progress as I'm now back
to where I'll be lucky to get in a couple of hours here and
there. And now that Spring is here, this will have to compete
for time with my outdoor activities (I really need to get a
round of golf in soon.)