Re: How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")

H. S. Teoh skrev:
 > On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 05:05:33AM +0000, Jeff Rollin
 > wrote: [...]
 >> My own conlang/artlang, provisionally called Vallian
 >> (Vn), attempts to minimize the number of independent
 >> "words" in a sentence by using as many suffixes as
 >> possible (the language is exclusively suffixing).
 > [...]
 >
 > This is very interesting. Taken to the logical conclusion,
 > you could end up with a conlang where every clause is a
 > single word, consisting of a root at the start, with
 > suffixes piled on behind it. E.g., you could start with a
 > verbal root, with some argument noun roots stuck behind it
 > in some order, with some tense/aspect morphemes thrown in
 > for good measure. The morphemes can "melt" into each other
 > via mutations, so that it's difficult to tell where
 > morphemic boundaries are.

Many if not the majority of Native American languages are
way ahead down that road, although they as a rule have both
prefixes and suffixes. Look up [[Polysysnthesis]] in
Wikipedia! When I cared about Esperanto and had some
working knowledge of it I used to amuse myself by
subjecting it to polysyntheis, which is quite possible and
at least theoretically licit according to the grammar, at
least in the sense that Esperanto already is heavily
agglutinating and quite lenient when it comes to forming
multipart compounds and stacking affixes, e.g. the entirely
cromulent exchange:

: _Kiel paskas?_
: Ki-el pask-as
: WH-MANNER easter-PRESENT
: 'How do celebrate Easter?'

: _Italuje._
: Ital-uj-e
: Italy-COUNTRY-ADV
: 'in the Italian way'

Admittedly it was hard to incorporate such things as
pronouns or adverbial, adjectival, nominal or case endings
without the result merely looking like I had just omittide
inter-word spaces, but I reasoned those morphemes could just
be skipped. In theory _Italujpaskanto_ is a cromulent word
for 'someone who is celebrating Easter the Italian way' or
'in Italy', so I'd just turn it into a verb
_Italujpaskantas_. Admittedly the omission of a number of
markers creates ambiguity, so it must be regarded as a
langvuage game rather than as an alternative grammatically
correct form of expression, but the tendency is there. I
wonder if it would come naturally to a Cree Esperantist, if
there are any, to speak Esperanto that way...

--

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

"And therefore every care must be taken that our
auxiliaries, being stronger than our citizens, may
not grow to be too much for them and become savage
tyrants instead of friends and allies."
                    -- Plato (The Republic, Book 3, 416b)

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