Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

From:Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>
Date:Monday, June 23, 2003, 18:14
On Monday 23 June 2003 10:57 am, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Has anyone evolved an inflecting conlang from an agglutinating one? If so, > how did you go about it?
Proto-Enamyn (which I created merely to make sense of the myriad of different mutations, sound changes, and whatnot in Enamyn; it's not intended to be anything more than a sketch) was agglutinating, while Enamyn is heavily fusional. In terms of evolving between the two, it's mostly a matter of deciding what morphemes get mashed together and what stay separate. Thus, in Proto-Enamyn, the case, number, and class morphemes all started to blend together. As time went on, the inflections reduced to the point where they no longer indicated class (since there are only two, animate and inanimate, and prepositions already distinguished between them, it was superfluous and dropped out) and there was a number of collisions between the the various remaining morphemes, such that there were several phonetically identical morphemes that, depending on context, indicated different combinations of case and number. At the same time, the definitive article morpheme, which had been a bound morpheme, became a free morpheme. Also consider the effects of word boundaries. For instance, Proto-Enamyn was strongly verb-initial, with the tense morpheme occuring as a suffix to the verb stem. However, sandhi between the case markers (which were prefixed to the nouns) and the tense marker created allophonic variation in the tense marker. As the language became increasingly fusional, the tense marker was re-analyzed as a part of the noun, and the allophonic variations of the tense marker became phonemic. And thus was born "noun tense." There's more, of course, but I think you get the idea. Moving from agglutination to fusion wrecks havoc on carefully ordered grammars, so I highly recommend the process to facilitate creating realistic languages. :) :Peter -- Oh what a tangled web they weave who try a new word to conceive!