Cowan on morphology

[Mr Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

John Cowan argues that for maximal freedom from syntactic ambiguity,
words need to be self-segregating. I agree. He also argues that
for maximal freedom from morphological ambiguity, morphemes need
to be self-segregating.

In Lojban the semantic structure derived from the unambiguous
syntactic structure is unambiguous. This justifies the syntax's
freedom from ambiguity.

But in the case of word-meaning, *only ambiguous* semantic structure
can be derived from the unambiguous morphological structure. Whereas
if one knows the meanings of the words in a Lojban sentence one
may be sure of the sentence's meaning, if one knows only the meanings
of the morphemes in a Lojban word one cannot be sure of the word's
meaning: the meaning of the compound word has to be stipulated in
a dictionary just like any monomorphemic word; the meanings of
the morphemes simply serve as possible but not necessary indicators
of the sort of meaning the word might have.

Since the meaning of Lojban compounds is not predictable, the
unambiguous morphology is not really very useful, and it adds
extraordinary complexity to the language and to the task of
acquiring vocabulary.

A more rational design would make words self-segrating, but not
morphemes. Even if morphemes fail to self-segregate, they would
still serve as clues to the word's meaning.

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And