Re: First Conlang...? (Was Re: some insane West Greenlandic sentences)

Quoting Muke Tever <hotblack@...>:

> E f+AOk-sto Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
> > Quoting Muke Tever <hotblack@...>:
> >> E f+-AOk-sto Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
> >> > Is there a term for languages where you have essentially one-to-one
> >> > correspondence between morphemes and grammatical categories, but >
> >> forgoes agglutinating accretion of suffixes in favour of mutations >
> >> and infixes?
> >>
> >> I think that'd just be a fusional polysynthetic language.
> >
> > The definition of fusional is, or so I was taught, that single markers
> > indicate multiple categories. Eg Latin -a in _exempla_ indicates both
> > nom/acc and plural (and arguably neuter). In the kind of language I'm
> > asking about, there would still be one-to-one mapping between markers
> > and categories.
>
> What I get from _Describing Morphosyntax_ is that "fusion [...] has to do
> with the degree to which units of meaning are 'fused' into single
> morphological shapes".  There's no indication that this is limited to
> markers instead of roots;  in fact, the example of fusion given is that of
> Sabaot, where mutating the vowels of a word with +-ATR indicates imperfect
> aspect.  This is an example of fusion because the change cannot be
> separated from the rest of the word (you can't pronounce "+-ATR" on its
> own).  Other mutations, I think, would be in the same boat.
I shall apparently have to update my understanding of the term, then. Which
leads to the question; is there any term for what I thought it meant?

> > Also, I was of the impression that a _poly_synthetic language necessarily
> > tended to pile _many_ affixes into each word. A language which only
> > inflects its words for 2-3 categories could hardly be described as
> > polysynthetic, could it?
>
> Not heavily polysynthetic, no.
But lightly polysynthetic?

                                                      Andreas

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