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Re: Languages with the essential parts removed (was: Greek plosives)

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 14, 2006, 17:09
>John Verticle wrote: > >Stuff I don't want to copy and paste, but basically is asking whether > >wholly isolating is OK. > >No, I meant sort of like Mandarin Chinese, where you can have combined >roots (zhong guo ren = China country person = Chinese person = >Kiinalainen etc.) but the roots would be more combined.
>Basically it's just taking a Finnish word (I'm just >going to make one up: paatietosanakirjalanissa, literally >"chief.compendium.word.book.place.1SING-POS.INSIDE :) and dividing it >into its component parts. Same roots but a different structure.
I wouldn't call that "without agglutination". Of course, it works reasonably well, especially since many affixes are reduced forms of roots anyway. For example the nationality etc. suffix "-lainen" comes from the adjective "lajinen" meaning "of the type / species / class". But there are some affixes where this would be difficult... say, "isäntä" (host), from "isä" (father) (non-productive), or "talous" (economy) from "talo" (house) (irregular; lit. "house-ness") John Vertical

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Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>