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

E fésto 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.

> 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.

>> 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.
Yes, but the mutations are not standalone morphemes; they are fused.


        *Muke!
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