Re: just curious.. ;)

Doesn't Finnish only do this with certain stems, though? Such as mies- 'man'
can become miehe- under conditions where the following suffix would cause
prohibited consonant clustering?
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nik Taylor" <fortytwo@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2001 3:24 AM
Subject: Re: just curious.. ;)


> 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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