Re: Diachronic instability of oligosynthesis

Well, the traditional analysis of Chinese makes it look very
oligosynthetic, as there are relatively few morphemes, and many
compounds of those morphemes to create the actual words. (I know
that's not a few hundred morphemes, but about 5 times that). It's also
true that the traditional picture (that each syllable) is a "word" is
probably not really true, but at the least Chinese seems like what a
(mostly-oligo)-synthetic language would look like in the process of
re-fusion.

I'm not trying to make an argument about Chinese itself -- this is a
loaded issue where I have some tentative opinions but no real
expertise.

I tend to think real oligosynthesis in practice will become
lexicalized combinations very quickly, just as compound words (or even
recurring phrases) do in English.

As to pancakes, they are clearly computer-science food, because they
come in stacks!

would that be math-mind-machine-food?

  -- David

On 1/20/06, Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
> staving Jim Henry:
> >(An oligo-isolating language could
> >easily become oligosynthetic,
> >but otherwise, what would cause a language's speakers to
> >reduce their vocabulary from
> >tens or hundreds of thousands of morphemes
> >down to a few hundred?)
>
> The only thing I can think of is set of sound changes that drastically
> reduced the phonemic inventory, creating a lot of homophones, some of which
> were then replaced by derivational processes.
>
> Pete
>

--
   -- David