Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

"Juan A. Alonso" <tervingo@...> writes:

> Apparently, human languages usually evolve along a "typological circle"
>
> isolating -> agglutinating -> inflecting -> isolating ->....
>
> Thus, isolating languages become agglutinating (partially) by a process
> called grammaticalization, whereby specific words lose their original
> meaning and are only used as grammatical markers. Agglutinating languages
> become inflecting because of phonetic processes (assimilation, phonetic
> weakening, etc.), which may also be the main cause why inflecting languages
> become isolating with the time (English is a good example for this: it has
> become almost an isolating language, while Anglo-Saxon, its ancestor, was a
> highly inflecting language; In the same way, Finnish may be right now losing
> some of its agglutinating features and becoming more and more inflecting).
This is correct in principle, though reality is a bit more complex as two
or all three of these processes my be in operation in the same language
at the same time.  That is, while some particles are agglutinated to words,
existing agglutinating paradigms are messed up by sound changes and
yet other inflections are lost and replaced by constructions of the isolating type.
This is the reason why few languages represent one of the three
basic types in pure form.  Most combine isolating, agglutinating
and inflecting traits.

> I find it very amusing to "play this circle" with conlangs. [...]
Yes, me too.  Proto-Q ("Q" is a provisional label for my conlang family)
is a (mostly) agglutinating language with rather transparent alternations.
From there, the highly inflected, but less regular and agglutinative
High Elvish evolves, while the modern Low Elvish language has a more
analytical structure.

Jörg.

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