Re: Danish: tonal suffices?

>From: BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
>Subject: Re: Danish: tonal suffices?
>Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 21:24:56 +0200
>But the Quintessential Isolating Monosyllabic Language already exists:
>Vietnamese! ;-)  And tell me, was French 3000 polysynthetic?
Is Vietnamese monosyllabic in the same way as Chinese is (which is only
doubtfully so), or is it really monosyllabic? Are there true monosyllabic
languages out there?

Polysynthetic French? Well, the one I designed back then wasn't, probably
because I wasn't well familiar with typolocical classes. However, I'd
probably make it polysynthetic if I were to review it; a few days ago I was
complaining to my friend (both of us have studied French for 5 years) about
how difficult it could be to utter a French sentence word by word, as
opposed to the Spanish or Italian sentence. French words merge so much
together and associate in various ways, that you just can't say one word at
a time. You have to think the whole package through and then pronounce it
almost as one word. And that thought got me thinking in the back of my head:
"Isn't that sort of like those polysynthetic languages?"

>BTW: we are many who are into future/alternate timeline versions of
>natlangs!
Great! :)

>Bestum kvedjum,
I presume you don't mind corrections to your Icelandic, so:

Either
"Bestar kvedjur,"
or
"Med bestu kvedjum,"
(you need the "med" to warrant a dative case. "Bestum" would be the correct
pl.dat. form if it were indef.article; the superlativeness of "best",
however, warrants article, which means you have to go to the pl.def.article
adjectival declension, "bestu" (same for all cases, just add -u). In those
cases, the following noun need not have article (!). If you were using an
adjective form which were not comparative, like "go'd", you'd have "go'dum
kvedjum" or (with article) "go'du kvedjunum")

"Med bestu kvedjum," is the preferred phrase among Icelanders, of the two I
gave above.

Oskar
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