Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

Jim Grossmann wrote:
> open class morphemes:    Don't the Chinese have to know thousands to read a
> newspaper?
Probably.  The Japanese have reduced the "essential" list, to which
newspapers and the like usually restrict themselves to, to 1945 kanji;
and I remember my Japanese professor saying that Japanese children spend
about an hour a day in class for their entire school career learning the
kanji!  That's a heck of an investment in time!

> 2.    An agglutantive system in a language with lots of morphologically
> marked categories could have as many suffixes as a language with inflections
> for a few categories.
But when comparing languages with the same number of categories,
inflectional langs have more affixes.  Of course, IINM, agglutinative
langs tend to inflect for more categories and/or more differences within
the category (e.g., more cases, more numbers) than inflectional.  It's
definitely true that they CAN!  Turkish is supposed to have something
like 2,000,000 verb forms!

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