Re: relative tense and beyond!

Gary Shannon wrote:
>
> Feel free to correct me, if my ignorance is showing, but I don't really see
> how an agglutinating language would be any different, then, from a strict
> analytic language with all the air squeezed out from between the words.
Well, that's basically what it is, from an historical perspective.
Several qualities distinguish affixes from words.  For one thing,
they're phonologically part of the word.  In some languages, this is in
the form of accents, that is, only one stress per word.  This isn't in
all languages, of course, but it is a fairly common tendency.  Another
feature is that affixes often have variant forms, such as vowel harmony
variants, as in Turkish where the plural morpheme may be -lar or -ler,
depending on whether the noun is a "front" or "back" word, other types
of variants are letters which may be dropped.  For instance, in my
conlang, Watya'i'sa, the antipassive prefix is S(u)-, before a vowel or
approximate, the vowel is dropped, but before a consonant, other than
the approximates, the vowel is retained.  Agglutinative affixes are
usually (always?) obligatory, while isolating words are sometimes
optional.  Affixes are usually fixed in their order, while words usually
have some freedom in arrangement.  However, as you can see from my
comments, there is no cut-and-dry answer, and there is sometimes
controversy over whether a given morpheme is an affix or a word.  But,
usually it's pretty clear whether a given morpheme is an affix, a
clitic, or a word.

--
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was hanged." - Irish proverb
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