Re: Isolating syntax, agglutinating grammar

>Has anyone done a language where the structure is mostly isolating but
>the grammar has the form of a more agglutinating language?  In other
>words, instead of case endings on a word, you would just have a
>particle for each case?
How is this different from particles that aren't cases? I mean, you could
surely analyze English prepositions as "cases" too ("as cases" = essiv,
"from particles" = ablativ, etc.) but what's the point?

OTOH, I've contemplated a language that *looks* isolating - in that it'd be
dominatingly monosyllabic - but would express cases and stuff with
mutations, clustering of consonants and maybe even tones, too. (How likely
is it for tone to express grammatical meaning?) I'm however afraid the
morphophonology might get too strained.

Another side question - languages like English have used only a small part
of the possible monosyllabes. But how's it with "monosyllabic" languages
(counting tone)? This table for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table
does have some (but not that many) unexpected holes, but how much meaning is
tagged on each existing word? Can I expect more than one basic meaning per
most word+tone combinations?

John Vertical

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