Re: me and my languages

David Peterson wrote:

>     I'm David, I'm twenty, and I haven't been inventing languages for a year
> yet (October will be my one-year anniversary).  I've about 7; I'm working on
> all at the same time.  Incidentally, I came up with a new idea.  I started to
> created an agglutinative language in which just about all information was
> coded into the verb.  [...]  I'm sick, so I don't know if I'm
> explaining well...
No, you're making plenty of sense.  It's called "polysynthesis", and it's
well known, if not terribly common.  It's a basic feature of many Eskimo-
Aleutian languages, like Atkan-Aleut, which I've studied.

>     Anyway, I think I'm realizing my question here.  Is it feasible that
> there could be a language with no preferred word order whatsoever since all
> the information is encoded in the verb?
It is certainly possible, although it would probably be unique among
human languages.  There is a language spoken by about 300 or so
people on a small island in the Bering Strait  (it may be a dialect of Aleut,
but the memory fails) which, it is claimed, is the most morphologically
complex language on Earth.   It has subject, object and indirect object
agreement, noun incorporation, modal, voice, tense and/or aspectual
markers all as parts of the verb.  Phaleran comes close to that ideal,
although it has no widespread noun incorporation, does not have
much in the way of tense agreement, does not have agreement with
direct or indirect objects, and while it has two morphological modes
on the verb, most of the modes are really distinguished by adverbial
particles. Some dialects of Phaleran, however, have noun object
incorporation:

STANDARD:    Puwo        ather            gethasyonti.
                          boy.DAT  father-ABS  see.TR.3SgPfRe.S
                          'The boy has seen (his) father.'
DIALECTAL    Puwo         gætatherasayonæti.
(Önopales)         boy.DAT  see.father.TR.3SgPfRe.S

Whether a language like you describe is *feasible* is an entirely different
matter, however.  Its apparent rarity in the languages of the world would
probably suggest that it's not *very* likely to develop on its own, but you
could be the exception. Weirder things have happened.

> I was also toying with the idea of putting entire relative clauses
> inside the verb...
Phaleran doesn't quite do this, although the verb is marked as a relative
verb:

  G|arituo    sunesnâþþa   hneirgwanten                 ather
  son.DAT  bill.PL.ABE  give.REL.3SgPfRe.Qu  father.ABS
  'The father who, they say, gave his son some money'

> Anyway, I've never actually studied an agglutinating language, so I'm
> stumbly a bit blindly.
No, no.  You've intuitively hit on a really fun proposition that (I don't think)
anyone's done before.  Try it!

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos

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