User:Selguha/Sandbox

A mild critique of Latejami

Latejami is one of the most fully developed constructed languages in existence -- as far as grammar goes, at least. It appears on the whole to be a remarkable success at its goals. Although I'm unqualified to assess most of Morneau's work in Lexical Semantics, I can speak to his phonological and morphological choices. I question a few of these. The basics are sound, but certain things could have been done in more mnemonic and naturalistic ways.

Morneau's inventory and orthography are both very sensible. He uses a standard five-vowel system and the following set of consonants:

Latejami consonant phonemes

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	unvoiced	p	t	c  t͡ʃ	k
	voiced	b	d	j d͡ʒ	g
Fricative	unvoiced	f	s	x ʃ	h
	voiced	v	z	q ʒ
Nasal		m	n
Lateral			l
Rhotic			r
Semivowel		w		y j

Phonetic diphthongs are treated as vowel-semivowel sequences. Phonotactics are very strict, permitting no more than one consonant plus an optional semivowel in onset position and, where coda is present, only nasals (N) and optionally semivowels (S) in coda position. Maximal syllable structure is thus CV(S)N. This is fine. I'd perhaps be laxer on onsets and tighter on codas; diphthongs are fine, but codas such as that of loyn are ugly to me. As for the other phonotactical rules, they are sound. As far as orthography goes -- and this is a really minor point of preference -- I wouldn't represent semivowels with consonant letters in coda. The common practice is to use vowel letters: this is the convention in almost every natural language written in the Latin alphabet outside of Eastern Europe. Also, I think q is better for glottal stop than for /ʒ/ (assuming word-initial glottal stops, if present, are either not phonemic or not written, as is the norm). The phoneme /ʒ/ is one of the most unnecessary of the standard Lojban-Loglan-Latejami set, in my estimation. In what major languages is it fully contrastive with /d͡ʒ/ or /zj/, not just contrastive in loanwords and/or restricted in occurrence? French, English (though the contrast has a low functional load) and uh, Polish? Turkish? Only the /v/-/w/ contrast appears to be rarer among major languages. Latejami has both /d͡ʒ/ and /zj/ (in at least one relatively common syllable, zyu).

But so far, so good; these are just quibbles. Latejami's biggest problem is that it doesn't logically map consonants to morphological classes. Latejami's self-segregation strategy depends on words being composed of certain types of morphemes in certain possible orders; morpheme types are distinguished by different groups of segments. Morneau's description of these classes is reproduced below:

() indicates that the enclosed item is optional
{} indicates that the enclosed item may appear zero or more times
[] indicates that the enclosed item must appear one or more times
| ::= logical or
V ::= any vowel ::= a | e | i | o | u
S ::= any semivowel ::= y | w
C ::= any consonant ::= b | c | d | f | g | j | k | l | m | n | p | q | r | s | t | v | x | z
[The letter 'h' is reserved for anaphora ...]
C1 ::= modifier starter ::= b c d f j k q r t x z
[q and r not used in native words]
C2 ::= classifier terminator ::= g l m p s v
C3 ::= suffix terminator ::= g m n p s v
[Note that C3 is any classifier terminator except l, which is reserved for prefixes and classifier terminators. C3 also includes n, which can never start a modifier (but can terminate one).]
...
N ::= vocalic-nucleus ::= [V]
...
prefix ::= l N (n)
...
suffix ::= N C3 | N m C | N n C
...
classifier ::= C1 N C2
...
modifier ::= C1 N (n)
...
root-morpheme ::= modifier | classifier
...
root ::= {modifier} classifier
...
POS ::= part-of-speech marker ::= a, e, aw, yu, etc
...
word = {prefix} + root + {suffix} + POS


To slightly elaborate, words are of the following pattern (excluding anaphora): {prefix} + {modifier} + classifier + {suffix} + POS. The presence of a Classifier Terminator or Suffix Terminator consonant signals a word break after the following syllable, unless the next consonant is also a Suffix Terminator. It can be difficult for a new learner to remember which segments serve this crucial role. Once again, the full class of terminator segments is g l m n p s v, plus nasal-obstruent clusters. It is not clear why Morneau chose these consonants for this class. They have no salient phonological features in common; they are not even an section of the ordered consonant set of the Roman alphabet, such as "m n p q r s t". If Morneau had instead picked a natural class of consonants, or a union of natural classes, for this purpose, I would imagine that word resolution would be more easily intuited. For instance, single-segment classifier terminators could have been v z q l m n r, the sonorants plus voiced continuants. Perhaps Morneau wanted maximal phonetic variety among each morphological segment class. This is understandable