Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

I think that what you say is basically sound, but several qualifications
come to mind.

1.      Characters for open class morphemes will so outnumber characters for
closed-class morphemes that the difference between the number of morphemes
for agglutinated endings and inflectional endings might not seem that big
once your character inventory reaches a few thousand.

nom, acc, dat, sing, plur, dual -- six for agglutinating, nine for
inflection

past pres fut, perfect, simple, progressive, active, passive, middle,
indicative, interrog, neg --

twelve morphemes for agglutinating, eighty-one morphemes for inflecting

open class morphemes:    Don't the Chinese have to know thousands to read a
newspaper?

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.

agglut system:    singular dual plural masculine femine neuter nom. acc.
dat.  (9 morphemes)

inflect system:    singular dual plural nom. acc. dat.   (9 morphemes)

3.    If the closed-class inflections are all spelled out in a syllabery or
with alphabetic characters, you put a cap on the number of characters needed
for inflections.

Jim G.

> Not that I really know, but, it seems to me that a system like that
> would work much more simply with an agglutinating language than with an
> inflecting one, because an agglutinating language would (usually) have
> fewer suffixes, you just stick them on one after another.  An inflecting
> language, on the other hand, would have way more suffixes (or prefixes),
> you know?  But it's really only a matter of inventing characters for
> however many particles you have, at least as far as I can see, so the
> only benefit for an agglutinating system over an inflecting one is that
> there'd probably be fewer characters to make up.  Am I missing something
> big here?
> Nicole