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

On Wednesday, June 30, 2004, at 10:45 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 05:07:06PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Although it decomposes nicely into -a:=feminine + -rum=genitive plural,
> v. -o:=masculine/neut + -rum=genitive plural. :)
Only with adjectives - there are masculine 1st declension nouns (e.g.
nauta, poeta, agricola & quite a few proper nouns), and some feminines in
the 2nd declension (e.g. humus, fagus, ulmus); thus the -a:=feminine ~ -o:
maculine does not hold with nouns nor, indeed, do these vowels appear in
all case forms which is, surely, what they should do if the affixes were
agglutinating.

Also while -rum may be posited as denoting genitive plural in the 1st, 2nd
& 5th declensions, it does not do so with the 3rd & the declensions. The
only thing common to all genitive plurals os -um.

Thirdly, if Latin were agglutinating we'd expect the genitive plural to be
denoted by _two_ morphemes, one denoting genitive and the other denoting
plurality. This is not so in Latin.

-arum/ -orum fall down on every test of agglutination. They are flexions.

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).

>  The verb conjugation endings can *almost* be analyzed as
> combinations of tense (-a, -i, -o) + mood (-s or zero)
When can it have zero?

> or aspect (-nt-,
> -t-), but that analysis is foiled by the tenseless mood endings -i
> (=infinitive),
Agreed. I could never understand why, having giving a full range of active
& passive participles, Zamenhof had not done so with the infinitives as, e.
g. Ido does.  I'm not saying I like this, just there seems to be an
inconsistency of approach.

> -u (imperative), -us (conditional).
Yes, I have seen the conditional -us analyzed as -u- (tense marker) +s
(indicative mood marker), and also -nt- & -t- being added to the
conditional -u-. But I understand that the 'conditional participles', tho
used by some, do not have official sanction & are not recognized by all
Esperantists.  Also, of course, the conditional is not strictly a tense in
the same way that present (-a-), past (-i-) and future (-o-) are.

Yes, the verb doesn't behave in a 100% agglutinating manner (IIRC Volapük'
s verb, with its myriad of possible derived forms, is thoroughly
agglutinating).

The above BTW should *not* be taken to imply I prefer Volapük to Esperanto!
  I'm merely trying to make objective observations.
 =======================================================================
On Wednesday, June 30, 2004, at 11:38 , Roger Mills wrote:

> Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Perhaps we could say-- since it was rather clearly modeled on _inflecting_
> European langs., it is inflecting, but simplified with agglutinative
> tendencies. (That describes Kash as well, I guess.)
It may describe Kash well, but IMO it does not describe Esperanto well.

> Certainly not
> agglutinating to the extent that Finnish is.
Certainly not the nouns & adjectives - poor Esperanto only has two cases,
whereas Finnish has IIRC fifteen, which gives Finnish a slight edge.

> Or agglutinating but complicated with inflectional tendencies.
Now that, I think, is a fair description.

Ray
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