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Re: Danish: tonal suffices?

From:Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 4, 2000, 13:17
Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
-----<snip>-----
>>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?" > >Very likely. To speak good French, you mustn't think in terms of words but >of phrases. Pretty much like a polysynthetic language IMHO.
Close but not quite, IMO. The main difference would be that in a poysynthetic language, most (if not all) of the affixed morphemes in a polysynthetic word are bound in the sense that they are fully integrated phonologically, semantically, and syntactically to the base. In French, the words in a phrase or clause may be phonologically integrated, but they are not necessarily so semantically or syntactically -- French uses a lot of clitics. Furthermore, these words belong to a lexical category such as a verb, noun, preposition, etc. This is not necessarily the case in for the affixed morphemes in a polysynthetic word. So I would guess (since I don't have any native polysynthetic speaker intuition) that a speaker of a polysynthetic language thinks in terms of a package of morphemes rather than a package of words. -kristian- 8)