@Lady do you have thoughts on notating Semitic-style triconsonantal root morphology in glosses
@alyssa i’d probably gloss himidkʰí as “m-d-kʰ.DIM” or “[language].DIM”; is that kind of what you are asking?
@Lady kinda.
i think the main points i'm undecided about are:
- should i mark the pattern morpheme within the Midêkʰ text? is that worth the ugliness of ending up with "
gn-\<hi>m\<i>dkʰ\<í>-k" (glossed as perhaps "DAT(F)-word-PL")... - well, i hadn't thought about this problem before yours but, the question of whether to include a gloss for the meaning of the derived stem or that of the root or both...
@alyssa i think regarding (2) the guidance is to make a determination as to the lexical/grammatical divide, like…
if you think that the derived stems are *grammatical* derivations, i·e that they represent the same word but with different grammatical properties, then you would just gloss the root and add suffixes for the new properties (agent, instrument, diminutive, etc.)
if the derived stems are *lexical* derivations (they produce new words), then generally i think you would gloss the whole derived stem rather than breaking it out, because while the root might be of etymological interest, it could just as well be misleading from a glossing perspective
@alyssa for (1), i’m not sure that i would particularly care to break up things beyond a word level, or try to make the gloss match the order of the morphemes in any particular way. i’d probably just put the meaning of the word first, and then add affixes based on “importance” or “closeness” to the root, with the understanding that people interested in sub‐word analysis would probably need to read up on morphology a little bit
@Lady yeah seems reasonable. for 2 yeah the derived stems are indeed considered words (a speaker of the language would be aware of the root and pattern and what each tend to mean but the specific meaning of each combination has to be learned separately). so i guess i’ll go with not marking the root or pattern explicitly and glossing for the meaning of the particular stem. (if people need to know the root they can look up the stem in the lexicon)
