Re: Danish: tonal suffices?

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)