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

From:Muke Tever <hotblack@...>
Date:Friday, January 9, 2004, 7:53
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! -- http://frath.net/ E jer savne zarjé mas ne http://kohath.livejournal.com/ Se imné koone'f metha http://kohath.deviantart.com/ Brissve mé kolé adâ.

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>