Re: Prefixes and typology

Patrick Littell wrote at 2005-05-28 18:21:54 (-0400)
 > On 5/28/05, Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:
 > >
 > > In a message dated 5/27/2005 5:43:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
 > > zaintoum@GMAIL.COM writes:
 > >
 > > >one thing that I've noticed in typology is that in all the VSO
 > > >or head initial languages that I've seen, or that I think I've
 > > >seen, all of them have some grammatical alterations that occur
 > > >in the first part of the word, like they use more prefixes or
 > > >lenition or similar. I wanted my current language to be fairly
 > > >typical of Head Initial ones, but I'm wondering if a language
 > > >that is almost exclusively prefix-favoring would be possible or
 > > >typical.
 > >
 > > According to what I've read on the subject, VSO languages have
 > > more prefixing than SOV languages do, but still tend to have
 > > suffixes as well. While there are a lot of languages that are
 > > (almost) exclusively suffixing, hardly any are (almost)
 > > exclusively prefixing.
 >
 >
 >
 > :nods: I was going to say pretty much the same thing. There's nothing
 > typologically impossible about an exclusively prefixing language, but
 > they're rare. Also, I can't think of any language that's as seriously
 > prefix-stringing as the seriously suffix-stringing languages are.
 >

Athabaskan?  Some languages have nearly 20 prefix slots in the verb
template.  Although it's rare for very many of those to be filled on
the same word, and I hear some of them are really clitics.  And there
are _some_ suffixes.

 > Why's this? Not sure, but my intuition is that affixes-gone-wild,
 > at least on nominals, is more a property of dependent-marking
 > languages than head-marking ones, and verb-initial languages tend
 > towards the head-marking side of things.

Athabaskan languages are, of course, basically verb-final and
head-marking...