Re: me and my languages
| From: | Jesse Bangs <jaspax@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, September 10, 2001, 17:23 |
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> 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.
As someone else already commented, this is known as "polysynthesis."
It's pretty common, but not all that well understood.
> So, if you wanted to say "I will be eating it for you", you'd
> say:
> uwinemasakevala.
Not only does this make sense, but you have a beautiful word. It sounds
like Finnish, except that Finnish doesn't have a /w/.
> So, let's say you wanted to emphasize the "for you" part. You'd
> use some sort of preposition like "pa" to mean "for", and it could be
> said/written either:
>
> 1.) pa la uwinemasakevala; or 2.) uwinemasakevala pa la.
I might expect "pa" to be an affix, but otherwise this is fine. You
might want to consider that when a certain part of the verb is projected
outside, then the affix is dropped from the verb itself, too.
> 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?
Yes. I have heard that Hungarian has no preferred word order (Frank
Valoczy will verify this), and it isn't even as agglutinative as this.
> I was also toying with the idea of
> putting entire relative clauses inside the verb...
This is the only thing that seems unreasonable to me. Relative clauses
are, by their nature, infinitely embeddable, and so if you include them
in the verb you will wind up with infinitely long words. Of course
they'll never occur, but even a twice-embedded clause would be very
unweildy, and those aren't uncommon at all. (What I mean by
"twice-embedded" is something like this: "I like the man who brought me
the food I ate", which is [I like the man [who brought me the food
[(that) I ate.]]])
Jesse S. Bangs Pelíran
jaspax@ juno.com
"There is enough light for those that desire only to see, and enough
darkness for those of a contrary disposition." --Blaise Pascal
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