Re: Polysynthetic nouns
| From: | Amanda Babcock <ababcock@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 3, 2004, 15:19 |
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On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 10:55:22AM -0400, Paul Roser wrote:
> The language you refer to is Tariana, and Dr. Aikhenvald published a
> grammar on it within the past year or so (I think it's Cambridge University
> Press, but can't remember and the book is at home). Tariana is an Arawakan
> language from South America, but similar nominal complexity occurs most
> notably in a number of Australian languages like Kayardild and
> Mayali/Bininj Gun-Wok (Gunwinjguan languages, IIRC).
>
> I don't have any examples handy, but this is the morphological template for
> nouns and predicates in Tariana:
[incredibly complex templates removed]
The blurb for this book on Amazon makes the language sound like something
which, if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent. The speakers traditionally
marry outside their language (a new idea on me), and are therefore likely
to speak 5 or 6 languages each. Furthermore, they have imported grammatical
features from other languages. Talk about a conlanger's carte blanche...
Amanda
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