Re: Agglutinating -> inflecting

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!