Re: TERMINOLOGY: Re: another new language to check out

Hallo!

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 20:29:24 +0100,
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> [...]
>
> -arum/ -orum fall down on every test of agglutination. They are flexions.
Right.

> Cf. Volapük, which is agglutinating:
>                 Singular                Plural
> Nom.    fat (father)    fat-s
> Gen.    fat-a                   fat-a-s
> Dat.    fat-e                   fat-e-s
> Acc.    fat-i                   fat-i-s
>
> (They are, of course, normally written without the hyphens).
> [snip]
> > But to return to the question at hand - how to analyze Esperanto?  Most
> > of the affixes are single morphemes with a single meaning, hence
> > agglutinative.  Certainly the noun/adjective declension is agglutinative
> > as well: part of speech (-o or -a) plus number (zero or -j) plus case
> > (zero or -n).
>
> Agreed - tho rather oddly Esperanto has the plural marker _before_ the
> case marker in the accusative plural (bela-j-n dom0-j-n "beautiful houses"
> ), whereas in all the agglutinative langs I can think of the plural marker
> comes after the case marker (as, indeed, it does in Volapük).
No, it is Volapük that's odd here.  Most agglutinating languages
I have seen have the plural marker between the stem and the case marker,
e.g. Turkish:

ev        `house'
ev-ler    `houses'
ev-de     `in the house'
ev-ler-de `in the houses' (not **ev-de-ler)

Esperanto, where the accusative plural of `house' is _domojn_
rather than **domonj, shows the normal behaviour of an
agglutinating language.  This is also quite logical,
as the plurality is an inherent property of the referent
of the noun, while the case suffix expresses a relation
between the noun and something else.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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