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

E fésto Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
> Quoting Muke Tever <hotblack@...>:
>> 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?
I couldn't say.

>> > 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?
Isolation < --- > polysynthesism is a scale which, for some reason, only
has named ends.  Languages anywhere in the middle have to make do with
qualified versions of those names (slightly polysynthetic, heavily
isolating, whatever).

Unless we can produce a medial term (lukesynthetic? continenting?
'oligosynthetic' appears to mean something else already), that's probably
the best we can do.



        *Muke!
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