Re: just curious.. ;)
| From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, October 27, 2001, 3:24 |
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David Peterson wrote:
> My understanding was that the difference between polysynthetic and
> agglutinative was that in agglutinative language you had no real phonemic
> variation, whereas in polysynthetic you could...?
My agglutinating languages have phonetic variation, Finnish, for
instance, has consonant gradation, where the stem has two forms
depending on which suffix is added. Turkish has vowel harmony.
Japanese has varying stems (e.g., kaki-tai "I want to write", but
kaka-nai "I don't write"), altho that's also sometimes analyzed as
simply epenthetic vowels, e.g., -(i)tai = want, -(a)nai = negation.
Polysynthetic, I believe, is characterized by suffixes being an open
class and allowing incorporation, that is, making another word into a
part of a word.
--
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