Re: Unilang: the Morphology

Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
>Hi!
>
>Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...> writes:
> > >Regular case endings are indeed agglutinative sufixes,
> > >and when they are written with space,
> > >they are postpositions, particles and auxiliary words.
> >
> > Hm, is that strictly true? If I have, for example, a completely regular
> > auxlang were the sg nom takes no ending, the pl nom takes _-s_, the sg
>acc
> > takes _-n_ and the pl acc takes _-k_, this would mean that the lang is
> > inflective and not agglutinative, wouldn't it?
>
>Well, I would not consider it regular if number and case are mixed in
>one ending.  Yes, it would be inflecting because of this.
So, according to your definition inflextion is irregular by definition?
>
> > Neither would it be
> > isolating, since atleast _s_ and _k_ can't be words by themselves.
>
>Why not?  Russian has both `s' and `k' as prepositions.  :-) And
>prepositions are very close to case endings in agglutinating languages
>(-> Finno-Ugric).
I know of that Russian habit, but I thought they were just WRITTEN by
themselves. If they're truly independent words, then I assume they're
actually pronounced as [s@] and [k@], or perhaps [@s] and [@k]?

I am, of course, operating on the theory that a 'word' is an speech unit
that can be pronounced by itself and is "complete". According to this
definition, the reduced forms of the English copula (-'m, -'re, -'s) aren't
proper words - you won't say [z] in isolation if asked what the 3rd sg
present of 'to be' is. If that Russian {s} is pronounced as part of the
preceeding or following word, I won't consider it a 'word' on its own, but
rather as an affix.

                                                       Andreas
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