Re: Language sketch -- Lassaptakl

Danny Wier wrote:

>Independent words becoming bound morphemes.  Could explain the origin of
>languages in general!  My studies on Nostratic and other things lead me to
>believe that, if you believe in linguistic monogenesis from Babel,
>inflecting languages evolved from agglutinating languages.
This is pretty speculative, I think.  There is evidence to suggest that
morphological change is unidirectional (changes from agglutinating
to inflectional, from inflectional to isolating, and from isolating to
agglutinating are all well-attested; while changes from agglutinating
to isolating, isolating to inflectional, and inflectional to agglutinating
are extremely rare).  But I don't think there's sufficient data to
determine which (if any) of these types, isolating, agglutinating, or
inflectional, was the 'original' type for all languages.  The question
is almost certainly unanswerable, as is the question of monogenesis
versus oligogenesis.

Matt.