Re: Isolating syntax, agglutinating grammar
| From: | taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, April 8, 2006, 20:12 |
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* John Vertical said on 2006-04-08 15:01:49 +0200
> 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.
Some African languages show tense by changing a high tone to a low tone,
or a rising to a falling, on the verb. IIRC Akan marks past tense this
way or was it Ewe? Anyway, while there are some languages with plenty
of tones and vowel-differences (Vietnamese, Cantonese), all
tone-languages seen as one, the norm is to have only two tones, meaning
there aren't that many grammatical things you can show this way.
Polarity is one though, toggle the tone to say no...
t.