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

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.

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?

> Doesnt the idea of mutations undermine the idea of one-to-one mapping?  If
> something has mutated, then it expresses both its original meaning and and
> the mutation's meaning, doesnt it?
That would be good for isolated things like English umlaut plurals - speakers
presumeably internally treat things like _men_ as suppletive. But in a
language with regular mutations I would expect the unmutated from to be there
underlayingly, with the actual mutation as a kind of surface merger of
morphemes. Of course, I'm neither a linguist or a neuroscientist.

                                                         Andreas

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