Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> >>>> Of course, this hasn't happened in English -- yet.  But it might.
> >>>> Already I notice that many of my students -- and one or two of the
> >>>> contributors to this list -- write `a lot of' as `alot of', suggesting
> >>>> that they feel the article to be fused to the following item in this
> >>>> case, at least.  There is nothing to stop English from doing the same
> >>>> thing that Basque has done, but at the other end of the noun phrase.
> In Euskara, even if the article is written as a
> suffix, and even provokes phonological changes in words where it is
> attached, it is attached at the end of the _noun phrase_, not the noun,
> showing thus exactly the same behaviour of 'the' (but in mirror image). For
> example:
>
> emakumea (woman-the): the woman
> emakume gaztea (woman young-the): the young woman
>
> In this respect, English and Euskara function quite the same (the
> difference being that Euskara do such things also with plural and case
> endings, they come at the end of the _noun phrase_, not the noun).
Indeed, it shows great similarity between Basque and English.
The difference is that in Basque the article is completely fused,
whereas in English it remains a separate word, both in spelling
and speaker's intuition, but that could easily change over time.

To fuse or not to fuse articles, that was the original question
here; apparently the answer is that it works fine either way.