Re: oligosynthetic (was: affixes)

Muke Tever wrote at 2005-02-18 00:24:38 (-0700)
 > 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 Whorf in a couple of unpublished papers on Nahuatl.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.
 >

Where did you read Whorf using "oligosynthetic"?  Have you seen the
microfilms at the University of Chicago (or have these been published
now)?  I don't recall seeing the word used in _Language, Thought and
Reality_, which contains most of his published work (although I think
his analysis of Nahuatl was mentioned in the preface).  Of course, I
may have forgotten something, and I don't think I read every word of
the book to begin with.

Anyway, I don't know what Whorf may have meant by "oligosynthetic" on
other occasions, but in these papers, I refer you to the account of
Dirk Elzinga, who's read them (as has Brad Coon):

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0208D&L=conlang&P=R17334

 | [...] He posits a set of formatives, each of which is larger than a
 | phoneme (usually) but smaller than a "root" (in the Paninian or
 | Indo-European sense). He calls such formatives "elements", and
 | claims that Nahuatl words are most insightfully analyzed as
 | collocations of such elements. The thirty-five elements he posits
 | for Nahuatl are given below; they are taken directly from the paper
 | [...]

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