Re: Grie Ka #1 (was Re: ,Language' in language name?)

En réponse à Hiroshi Kato <hkato@...>:

>
> Anyway, here I have a question (actually two).
>  Even in a romance language like French, IIRC,
> inflection (declension, conjugation, etc.) is mainly carried out by
> changing the
> ending of the word, not the beginning of the word.
> Am I right? And if I'm right, I'm wondering why it is so. (Psycology?)
No, just the fact that Romance languages have evolved from a language called
Latin which happened to mark inflections by ways of suffixes, itself because it
evolved from a language that marked inflections by endings, etc... Reasons in
linguistics are only historical (at least most of them). When you try to find
the reason why a language is "like that", it's usually because it evolved from
another language whose features evolved into what you see now.

> Or would anyone on the list provide me the interesting examples of
> languages
>  where inflection is done by changing the begining of words?
>
French! Yes, you were mistaken (like even the French are) by the nature of the
French orthography. But even though written French marks inflections (like
plurals or conjugations) by suffixes, the spoken language itself is much
different. Except for a few nouns which have a different spoken ending in the
plural, most nouns don't change in the plural (the plural -s is only
orthographic, it's not pronounced). It's the article they get stacked in front
of them (which, since it has no own stress, can be considered as a prefix) that
marks number. As for conjugations, despite the fact that written French
persists in writing the subject pronouns as independent words, they are
absolutely not! "je" doesn't exist except as a prefix put in front of verbs to
indicate the first person singular. The independent form of the 1st person
singular is "moi". The French conjugation relies mostly then on prefixes to
mark person and number, and on suffixes to mark tense (those suffixes agreeing
partly in person and number with the subject). The written suffixes are
misleading, since they are nearly not pronounced anymore, or nearly identical.
Of course, the problem of the French conjugation (and all the grammar in fact)
when you analyse it like that is that it becomes partly polysynthetic (forms
like "je ne t'ai rien dit" can really be analysed as a single polysynthetic
entity, since it has only one stress), and it seems that French grammarians are
not yet prepared to accept that French has so much changed compared to its
illustre ancestor Latin.

As a conclusion, when you study French, don't be misleaded by its orthography.
It gives the idea that French is an inflecting language using mostly suffixes,
while in fact French is a partly polysynthetic language using mostly prefixes
and a few suffixes.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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