Re: isolating is equivalent to inflected

Gary wrote:
<<
So did I.E. start out as purely isolating before
anyone wrote it down for the first time? Was the
arbitrary decision to write isolated nouns and verbs
and their following particles as a single unit the
reason why we call Latin inflecting, when it's really
isolating?
 >>

One major way of telling whether something is one or two
words is the prosodic pattern.  In a stress language, presumably
if it's two words, there's two stresses; if not, there isn't.  So at
any given point in time, it's probably easy to say whether it's
isolating or inflectional.  Over time, though, yes, what you say
is right, and this is what's been happening with several of the
pidgins and creoles.  So with Melanesian Pidgin English...

Mi baembae itim ap "food" (don't know the word).
/I future eat "up" food/
"I'll eat the food."

Then that preposition became reanalyzed, and transitive verbs
get marked with the "-im" suffix, so it became:

Mi baembae itimapim "food".
/I future eat-TRANS. food/
"I'll eat the food."

And that word "baembae" got shortened simply to "bae", and is
in the process of becoming a verbal prefix.

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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