Re: Diachronic instability of oligosynthesis

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?)

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field

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