Cross-linguistic Morpheme Analysis

Well, you clearly are VERY knowledgeable about language.

I feel honored to be having these exchanges with you.

Tomorrow, I intend to tackle "Diagramming Shakespeare 26" I love that sentence.

Chester,
In your attachment, what do the colors indicate?
I can't really understand the image very well. The Persian is still written there right to left. Correct?
Frank

Considering your view, I revised the picture: each rectangle includes a separate chunk, and the colors of each chunk are independent of those of the next rectangle. The words in red are not in English or German sentences or not existent at all in the languages. And, as you see, word-formation structures are not one-to-one; that is, a word with three morphemes in Persian is equal to three words in English and German. Can you find such an example in the picture?

And the Persian words are right-to-left. Adjective are after nouns in Persian.
The first chunk (top-left) is the easiest one. It’s an apostrophe, with the star being the entity addressed. If you find any clashes in the German sentence, please let me know.
By the way, I had to make it smaller than its actual size, which has damaged the quality.
Maybe attaching pictures is a not the best chioce. Will pasting them to the massage textbox do the trick?

How would it be to write the English from right to left? -- at least by word (not by letter). That would be interesting. English speakers could read the sentence if they cared enough to try and it would be sort of like going half way.

I hope others are watching this experiment.

You might find this interesting: Nostratic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yes, that looks very interesting.

I will have to take more time later to look at it.

Thanks,

Frank

Dear mmasy,

That article was very interesting. If I were a young man, just going into linguistics, it could be life changing.

Since I am not doing that, I was reminded of my original purpose on this website, which is to have fun diagramming sentences and to show that it can be a competitive sport.

I certainly hope that the research continues regarding that macrofamily.

Thanks,

Frank

I think I know why it’s a bit difficult for speakers of left-to-right languages to work out the writing system of other languages, while the opposite is not usually observed; but why?
It’s very simple: speakers of right-to-left languages start to learn mathematics as they learn their language, so writing from left to right is a very common habit among them.


Now let’s take a look at the first chunk. The word order of the English version is based on the Persian sentence. تو = thou, اي = Ο, ستاره= star, بزرگ = great.

تو اي ستاره بزرگ
Thou O star great!

Frank,
I checked the website (livemocha) and found it interesting. Thank you. Membership seems to be necessary.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mmasny

You might find this interesting: Nostratic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Wow! That’s an intricate language galaxy.

The morphological reconstruction reminds of some of the characteristics of Farsi:


v No inflectional morpheme for the third person.
v ʔaba:we have this word in Persian.It has remaned unchanged!!!
v ʔ[a]b∇:we also have this one which is pronounced /aab/.
v /mi/: reminds me of /man/ = I.
v /tuː/:I have already mentioned this one in my contrastive picture where I called it a prehistoric cognate.
v /mæ/: this one has remained unchanged in modern Persian.
v /q̕o/:and this one is, in Persian, pronounced /kee/ = who.
v /borV/:very intersting!!! This is in Persian pronounced /barf/ and means snow.

Thanks a lot mmansy!

I need to scrutinize it more, because I find the phonology perplexing.
I hope other members discover modern forms of the proto-forms in that list and share them with us, and also hope what Frank hopes about it.