Re: Optimum number of symbols, though mostly talking about french now

En réponse à "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

>
> Well, that depends on your theory of morphology.  Do you call
> clitic pronouns a agreement markers?  If so, some French verbs
> (IIRC) inflect for person, number and gender of subject, direct
> object, indirect object.  Working linguists I know actually
> disagree about this fact, so I think it's fair to claim that
> French verbs inflect for gender.
>
Well, the problem is that even in spoken French their status is of mandatory
clitics, not affixes (yet :)) ). I don't know if the fact that they do have
agreement in number and gender with the things they refer to can be considered
to be agreement of the verb with the nouns around. I don't rule out that it can
be considered so. I just don't know if it's better to consider it that way or
not. And anyway I doubt that Kendra was taught French that way. She probably
got the traditional teaching where the clitics are called pronouns and not
considered really part of the conjugations. I was answering her in those terms,
not in terms of modern linguistic analysis of French (also, the discussion was
about written French, which doesn't have the quasi-polysynthetic structure of
spoken French. French is slowly heading towards the same situation as Latin
did: a "Classical" language written but nearly never spoken vs. spoken "Vulgar"
dialects nearly never written, with differences growing between the two).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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