Re: oligosynthetic (was: affixes)

Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
> Doug Dee wrote at 2005-02-17 18:56:13 (EST)
>  > In a message dated 2/17/2005 12:44:09 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>  > joerg_rhiemeier@WEB.DE writes:
>  >
>  > >The word you are looking for is "oligosynthetic".  And the claim
>  > >that Nahuatl is oligosynthetic is utterly false.
>  >
>  > Are there any oligosynthetic natural languages?
>
> Basically, "oligosynthetic" is a term which was used by Benjamin Lee
> Whorf in a couple of unpublished papers on Nahuatl.
When I was reading Whorf, he didn't seem to use "oligosythetic" to mean
anything other than what we mean when we say that a language is built up
 from a set of roots;  e.g. most native English words can be analyzed as
being built up from basic [Indo-European] roots, maybe no more than a few
hundred of them--what's to keep English from being "oligosynthetic"?  It
just seemed that in Nahuatl this process may have been more transparent.

(Despite the formation of the word "oligosynthesis" itself, it didn't seem
to have anything to do with polysynthesis or anything.)

[Of course, this was a long time ago, and I may have missed out on/forgotten
a lot since then.]

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/

Replies