Compounds and branching direction

This is a translation of yesterday's post, which I'd been meaning to write since last December and it suddenly occurred to me I might actually be able to express in Koa. It was challenging in places and not quite as free-flowing and expressive as it would have been in English, but still it's the first-ever meta-article in Koa which feels like a milestone!

There were lots of vocabulary and usages being invented on the fly, not all of which I'm sure about: nóava "name (tr)," since I don't have a word for "express" or "mention"; pamulíkema "compound," i.e. "put-together-thing"; páama "head" and nálama "dependent," and so on. (Should "head" be étuma or something? Either way étuvike would be "matrix clause" and nálavike "subordinate clause.") I also don't yet have a word for "order," which irritatingly necessitated the circumlocution nácate "arrangement." On the other hand I'm pretty pleased with VM as the acronym for vike méama "noun phrase," to which we could also add VE = vike étema "verb phrase" and VI = vike ílama "modifier phrase." I've been slowly working on other Koa-specific linguistic vocabulary on the side which I'll eventually want to unveil; some examples are étema aivu "passive verb" (e.g. nipaloha), méama lala (oétema) "(deverbal) instance noun" (e.g. súote), and méama litu eli "definite plural noun" (e.g. ukunu).

I might mention that the problem described in this post is getting kind of galling given how many compound nouns have found their way into regular usage, with more appearing all the time. Every single time I say or write ésipai "Monday" I ask myself whether it really ought to be paiesi; my excitement at coining koláimiena "reunification" is tempered by anxiety that komienalai may be a more native structure somehow.

One thing about the head-final ordering is that it can sometimes generate worryingly long words with initial stress, which feels alien to the usual Koa cadence for long words. Nisilumutepanáeta "I wanted to make it visible," on the other hand, has nine syllables but is still natural to pronounce and clear to understand. Left-branching compounds can also end up being tricky to parse when they contain prefixes, suffixes and compound nouns: munálavikema "complementizer," grouped like [[mu[nála[vike]]]ma] "cause-subordinate-clause-thing"; or sometimes seem to need two written accents -- is that even allowed? -- like símipúhute "telephone conversation." Again, I have no answers, only vague anxiety.

A last note: it came out in the course of writing the below that the adverbial "often" translates into Koa as mouse, a discovery which caused me almost to break a rib laughing.

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For a few months I've been worrying about the fact that we apparently have two different ways of forming compounds in Koa, without any guidance or even discussion about the fact, really. In both methods the words are written together and the dependent bears the stress (I'm creating these grammatical words as I write, so they may not be permanent), but in one strategy the dependent precedes the head (címihale "grammar, e.g. language-structure") and in the other it follows (halecimi "structure-language").

In the beginning I thought that the second type was the only one possible, in accordance with the normal ordering of dependents and heads in Koa. But later on, maybe due to a bunch of time spent with Esperanto (how do we use foreign words, anyway?) my practice changed almost entirely. I might have been thinking that there wouldn't be enough distinction between ordinary adjective phrases and compounds if dependents were to follow in the same way.

After some research -- mainly an article by Laurie Bauer (great thanks to Allison for extremely kindly getting hold of it for me as usual) from a book I unfortunately haven't been able to identify -- I learned:

* Some languages use compounding more than others; some don't use them at all (?!)
* It seems that both structures are found cross-linguistically, even in head-initial languages
* There's a small tendency for compounds to be left-branching even in languages in which NP's are right-branching
* In general the ordering of heads and dependents in compounds is the same as that of possessed and possessor nouns
* Interestingly, in languages in which noun-modifies phrases and compounds use the same ordering, there is often no structural difference between compounds and ordinary NP's!

All this seems to mean...that we're not getting any help with this decision, aggravatingly. This leaves me in some uncomfortable confusion, because it seems like I should decide something and I have no idea which I like more. It could be that both strategies will have their own uses...maybe? Or maybe I just need to make a real decision, unfortunately. Anyway, I wanted to make the problem visible, at least, even if nothing at all is clear at this point!