Re: Where does inflection change to agglutination?

En réponse à Roberto Suarez Soto <ask4it@...>:

> On Dec/26/2002, Danny Wier wrote:
>
> > Well you're on the right track. Remember that Proto-Indo-European
> became
> > inflected after various alternations of an originally agglutinative
> form.
>
>         I didn't know that. Curious :-)
>
Why? Language evolution is quite logically cyclic. Take a language at an
isolating stage, where all words, even function words, are more or less
independent. With time, the function words lose stress and independence, and
become bound to the content words. Still, the separation between the content
word (becoming a root) and the function words (becoming affixes) is clear.
That's the agglutinative stage. Now with time, sound changes blur the frontier
between the root and the affix and blend affixes together, so that we loose the
equation "one morpheme=one meaning". That's the inflecting stage. Now as time
goes on, sound changes carry on eroding the word and the affixes slowly
disappear, while the language evolves new full words to take over the functions
that the affixes cannot assume any more. After a while, you're back at an
isolating stage and the cycle can begin again.

> > Semitic languages are more inflectional, particularly in all those
> verb
> > forms; they change vowel configurations. But even those has
> agglutinative
>
>         Have these changes any fixed rules? I guess so, just wondering
> aloud :-) Any examples?
>
Actually, Semitic conjugations don't "change" vowel configurations:
they "choose" those configurations instead. You have to remember that in
Semitic languages, only the consonants of a root (usually three) carry the
semantic information (sometimes with the help of one vowel) and the vowels are
chosen depending on the function of the word. But apart from that, yes, the
vowel configurations have rules, although the presence of irregularities make
the picture somewhat blurred. But for instance, for triliteral roots (roots
made of three consonants) in Arabic, the vowel configuration a-a-a (meaning a
[a] after each consonant) normally means: 3rd person singular masculine of the
past tense (which happens to be also the citation form of verbs in Arabic).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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