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

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 04:13:12PM -0400, David Peterson wrote:

>    I was under the impression that Esperanto was agglutinating.  It's
>    definitely not isolating, but I thought it went beyond inflection.
Well, I get this stuff wrong, too, but . . .

First, labelling an entire language "agglutinating", "isolating", or
"inflecting" can be misleading.  Usually a language is *mostly* one
of these but has features that work in one of the other ways.  The
same is true of other labels like "accusative" vs. "ergative", etc.

However, and here's where I'm treading on thin knowledge,
the ability to combine morphemes to create new morphemes does
not constitute agglutination.  Even if you have a universally productive
affix with a constant meaning, if the function is only morphological
rather than grammatical/syntactic, it's not agglutination.  I think.

And that's what Esperanto has - an inflecting grammar with a large
number of highly productive affixes.

-Marcos

Reply