Re: isolating conlangs

Leon Lin wrote:
> I am, in fact my goal is to make it completly isolating, no "morphology" at
> all. Sometimes I wonder if agglutinating and isolating are really two
> different things, I mean you could just define a word to include surrounding
> particles and then your isolating language has magically transformed into an
> agglutinating one!
>
>   -Leon
Can all the particles be used as independent words, or are any of them
bound morphemes? Certainly it's not hard to imagine how an isolating
language can turn into an agglutinative one as certain words end up
being attached to specific kinds of words. I'm only a little bit
familiar with Chinese, but the particle "de" for instance could easily
turn into a sort of case ending. If at some point in the future, "le"
started being used exclusively after verbs, it could turn into an aspect
suffix.

You could say the English "to" in infinitives is really a prefix:
"to-go", "to-eat", etc. But then you'd have to account for things like
"to boldly go" and so on. And at least in American varieties of English,
the verb can be omitted in some contexts leaving the word "to" by
itself. ("Why didn't you go back there?" "Because I didn't want to.")
It's easier to think of "to" as a separate word. But it's possible to
imagine a variety of English that uses "to" only as a prefix to verbs:
"to boldly go" would be said as "boldly to-go", and "I didn't want to"
as "I didn't want to-do-that".

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