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Re: polysynthetic languages

From:Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 24, 2003, 13:42
At 08:25 AM 9/24/03 -0400, you wrote:
>Isidora Zamora scripsit: > > > The polysynthetic names created some grammatical issues > > (which I won't go into here) about how to properly incorporate them into a > > sentence since they were both full sentences and nouns at one and the same > > time. > >Since you seem to be working to make your diachronics as realistic as >possible, I need to point out that proper names typically aren't treated >this way. Whatever grammar they may appear to have is typically >sealed off from the rest of the sentence; inflecting languages may add >external markers of case or gender or number, but will not recycle >underlying ones, or ones that appear to be underlying: the plural of >"Philips" is "Philipses".
Thanks for the tip. I may have to reconsider how the names are treated, then. (Although I don't really want to, because I came up with several cool things to do with polysynthetic names.) Isidora