Re: USAGE: Classification questions

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> It also seems that there's a very fine line between agglutination and
> inflection, since many inflections can be analyzed as
>
>         (root + original suffix) - original suffix + new suffix
Actually, no. I don't believe any modern theory of morphology allows
you to *remove* suffixes, so root + suffix cannot possibly be analyzed in
the way that you describe. There's no evidence that the native speakers of
such languages think of it that way, either.

English speakers are often taught Latin or Spanish in this mode, but
that's pedagogical convenience, not linguistic analysis.

> And often the suffix is universally applicable to other roots.
> For instance, in Latin the verb suffix -o means "first person
> present indicative".  You can argue that it's not agglutination
> because the -o isn't further analyzable into a piece that means
> "first person", one that means "present", and one that means
> "indicative".  But then what about the Klingon verb prefixes,
> which each convey the person and number of both the subject and the
> direct object but are not analyzable into subject and object pieces?
> What makes Klingon verb conjugation agglutinative while Latin is
> inflected?
This is somewhat true. "Agglutinative" v. "isolating" are labels given to
us for convenience, not hard-and-fast linguistic categories. Some sort of
distinction can be made by observing the overal tendency of each language,
though. In Finnish or Hungarian, an inflectional morpheme might indicate
two categories, but the overall scheme is one of stacking up separate
morphemes. There are bits and pieces of Latin that can be seen this way,
but in general you have to each ending whole, and the ending indicates
many different categories.

--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"