Re: Standard Average European

On 16/04/08 05:33:34, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
>
> Selon Tristan McLeay :
> >
> >> French requires the pronoun, though.  Remember the Grandsirian
> >> reanalysis...
> >
> > French is polysynthetic nowadays?
> >
>
> Quickly delurking again... :)
>
> First I'd like to say it's nice not to be forgotten :) .
>
> Second, yes Tristan, *Spoken* French is a good example of a
> polysynthetic language (hidden by an out-of-date orthography as a
> synthetic language - although actually, I'd say French is really two
> languages, one spoken and one written, a bit like Classical and
> Vulgar
Hello again Christoph! I did indeed know that was your opinion ---
well, kinda, I was pretty sure that was the argument you had, but
wasn't entirely sure if it was *your* argument (that you held) or that
it was one someone else held, that you reported.

...
> If I find a moment, I'll be happy to substantiate my claim, but let's
>
> just summarise some quick points already:
> - Spoken French features verbal agreement with the three main
> participants of the sentence.
> - It features incorporation and suffixation of semantic items (like
> adjectives in the nominal phrase, and adverbs and nouns in the verbal
>
> phrase).
> - It features a rather free topic-comment-oriented word order.
This is one point I'd forgotten you'd said! How free can the word order
be in a polysynthetic language, without it just being a regular
synthetic language? If you can move elements of words around, then what
is the case that they are words?

...

--
Tristan.

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