Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
> Has anyone evolved an inflecting conlang from an agglutinating one? If so,
> how did you go about it?
Classical Uatakassi is mostly agglutinating/polysynthetic.  However,
early sound changes *have* introduced some complications into the
inflection.  For example, altho for most words, the morphemes are easily
seperable, with relatively minor allomorphic variation, some roots have
alterations.

For example:

Katal: to fall asleep.  When a prefix ending in a vowel is added, the
ka- is dropped, and the preceding vowel is lenghtened.  E.g., Faatalu =
fa-katal-u = past-fall.asleep-I, "I fell asleep".  With nai- (future),
since diphthongs can't be lengthened, it's simply dropped, naitalu =
nai-katal-u.  Which also hapens to be homophonous with the 1st person
future punctual of tal, "wait".  The final l in katal is also replaced
by gemination with consonant-initial suffixes (which are all the person
suffixes except -u), thus, faataffin = fa-katal-fin
(past-fall.asleep-you.sing, "You fell asleep")
A number of verbs beginning with Ca- drop that /a/ after vowel-final
prefixes, e.g., labi, "give", falbil, "gave it", but not all, e.g., safi
"be born", fasafiu "I was born"

Many nouns have, in the singular, forms that are unpronounceable without
the gender prefix.  These therefore must have changes in the plural.
For example: pibbaas "danger" (pi-bbaas), plural pivblaati
(pif-bbaas-i).  Some have changes before certain suffixes.  For example,
uamisidan (ua-misidan) "spiritual journey", but uamisiznaf
(ua-misidan-(a)f) "of a spiritual journey".

So, even in the classical language there were already hints of
fusionality.  Its descendants, such as Ivetsian, using simple sound
changes, merged the affixes such that they became fusional forms, and
added new stem-changes, creating heavily inflected, complex, forms.

Others, such as Shatsenian dropped most of the affixes to create fairly
isolating forms.  Of course, Shatsenian was also heavily influenced by
pidginized forms, as it was *the* major trade point between the northern
and southern parts of the Empire.

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42