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

>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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