Re: Diachronic instability of oligosynthesis

staving Jim Henry:
>On 1/20/06, Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
>
> > Ultimately, an oligosynthetic language would be highly likely to evolve
> > into a non-oligosynthetic one. Could this be the reason why there are no
> > undisputed cases of oligosynthesis in the wild?
>
>Maybe... but sound change causes all kinds of languages
>to turn into other kinds of languages.  Isolating > agglutinative,
>agglutinative > fusional, and fusional > isolating
>seem to be typical.  Maybe the lack of oligosynthesis
>in natural languages is due to the absence of any
>means by which a non-oligosynthetic language could
>readily evolve into an oligosynthetic one.
>
>(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

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