Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

En réponse à Joe :


>As Christophe has said various times, French is essentially a
>polysynthetic language disguised as an isolating one.
Indeed. Look once again at the example Philippe gave: [StEm'pa] (stress 
added to show that the whole thing is a single word). It breaks down into:
S-                 t-                -Em- -pa
1st sg subj. pref. 2nd sg obj. pref. love neg. suf.

This example shows the true nature of French verbs: they take both subject 
and object prefixes (and even dative prefixes, making French conjugation 
akin to Basque conjugation :)) ), even when those subjects and objects are 
in the sentence ([sga'la ZlEm'pa]: I don't like that guy, where the [l] in 
[ZlEm'pa] refers to [sga'la]: that guy, and the [Z] is just another form of 
the 1st person singular subject pronoun :) . This example also shows that 
French is *not* SVO. It's more Topic-Comment, with the topic always first, 
whatever function it has), and they take suffixes to indicate negativeness 
(other negative suffixes are [ply]~[py] - both forms are possible - for "no 
more" or [padytu] for "not at all").

It sure gives another image of French than traditional grammars give 
doesn't it? :))

Oh, and if you want a run-down of [sga'la], here it is: -ga- is the root, 
meaning "guy", and s- -la is a demonstrative *circumfix* indicating a far 
object or having a pejorative sense :)) .

One day I'll just have to write a "true grammar" of French, taking only the 
Spoken French evidence, and not looking at its spelling ever :) . I'm sure 
the whole thing will look like anything *but* a Romance language :))) . 
Hence a new essentialist: French is essentially Inuktitut disguised as 
Latin :))) (although it's probably already in the list :) ).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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