Isolating or synthetic (was: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11)

Haendraeg isnerq:

> The whole thing will be polysynthetic again, I think, but that's more
> of an accident: I started with an isolating lang, like above, then
> made all the particles clitics that attach to the previous word.  This
> would yield the following words:
Funnily I'm starting to think of going the opposite way
with Sohlob!  I can't get no satisfaction :) WRT the
local case system, and since I'm looking at Classical
Chinese at the moment the idea of chucking the case
system altogether came up, especially as Mærik also has
a rich case system (8 cases), which I'm satisfied with,
and I don't want to repeat myself.

Now the problem is how to keep the lang ergative/fluid-S
if it is isolating?  Presumably intransitive sentences
would be VP while transitive ones be AVP.

And what about adpositions.  Should they be a free class
or derived from nouns or verbs?

There is also the problem of justifying vowel harmony
if the lang has no (grammatical) affixation!  I'ld
have to come up with a lot more derivational affixes
and/or keep the inflectional system on verbs but not
on nouns!


--

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)

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