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

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 21:07
Mark J. Reed wrote:
> See here for more: > > http://www.angelfire.com/ego/pdf/ng/lng/how/how_grammar.html >
So good to see that cited; it's just about the best guide I know of. Eminently sound and sensible. I trust it's included in the Conlang links site........ My rule of thumb would be that in agglutinating langs. the particles mark only 1 maybe 2 features: plural-- genitive-- past-- IO etc. and are discrete and readily identifiable. There may be some morphophonemic changes, but also identifiable. Whereas inflectional particles combine features into an inseparable whole: e.g. Lat. -a:rum marks genitive+plural+(mostly)feminine, no part of which can be said to mark plural or genitive by itself. (Though historically I gather agglutination was involved at the PIE level at least.)

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>