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

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 20:54
Esperanto is quite agglutinating I think when forming new words (there
are lots of productive suffixes to derive words with new meanings) but I
believe it is moderately inflecting (or quite isolating... somewhere on
the scale between say Latin and Chinese anyway, but closer to Chinese I
think) grammatically. This isn't the same as Swahili, where most verbs
have multiple prefixes and one or more suffix serving grammatical rather
than derivational purposes (there may also be derivational prefixes and
suffixes). For example:

Nakupenda (My favourite example sentence lol.. "I love you")
Ni-a-ku-pend-a
1st:person:subject-present:tense-2nd:person:object-love-indicative

I doubt that there are many Esperanto words that can bost being composed
of a stem + 4 affixes, but this is common in Swahili, and indeed there
are often verbs with many more affixes than this. What count or not is
of course open to debate; Object pronouns in Romance languages are
traditionally considered as words but they act more like prefixes.