Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:

> Tommie wrote :
> > What purely polysynthetic structures do -- and other types of grammatical structures
> > don't do -- is provide a strictly limited number of contexts in which any morpheme can
> > appear.  So, if the human mind is "predisposed to creating purely polysynthetic
> > structures", that means it is predisposed to limiting the variety of meanings that a
> > morpheme can have.
> I strongly agree with you. Also, these languages often refer to one specific context
> by means of a locution made of several morphemes. For instance, 'to give'
> would be referred to as 'hand...give' and 'cow' as 'animal-cow'. I think
> that Europeans often underestimate these 'classifiers' as 'redundant',
> whereas I do believe they are an inherent part of the concept evoked.
> It's not a question of compounding but of limiting and identifying the
> concept meant. Maybe 'grammar' originate from some of these parts of
> words having gained mandatory syntactic role ?
I wonder if this is what Otto Jesperson meant by "holophrastic".
Not the classifiers per se, but phrases that can only be varied
in one or two spots, like idiomatic expressions.