Re: polysynthetic languages

En réponse à Nik Taylor :


>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > One of the coolest features of Euskara has to be overdeclination. In
> > Basque, you can sometimes add a case suffix to a noun *already* declined!
>
>Uatakassi does that too.  :-)
Well, according to your examples, it's not exactly the same thing. What you 
have is case agreement, i.e. noun complements agree with the head noun in 
case too (and for this reason add a case mark corresponding to the head 
noun case). What happens in Basque is somewhat different. A declined form 
like "urrez": "with gold" can only be used adverbially, i.e. as a verb 
complement. To make it into a noun complement, the genitive case mark is 
added to it. So it's not a case of case agreement, but true 
overdeclination, in the sense that both case marks actually modify the 
grammatical function of the noun.

You may notice that this can actually come back to the thread there was 
about English prepositional phrases able to complete both verbs and nouns 
(creating ambiguities) while Latin prepositional phrases could complete 
only verbs (requiring relative subclauses like "Pater noster qui es in 
caelis"). The system Uatakassi uses is a bit like the English system, and 
adds case agreement to solve the ambiguity problem. The Basque system is 
more like Latin (in that most oblique complements cannot complete nouns) 
but instead of using relative subclauses adds case marks to make those 
oblique complements into genitives which can actually complete nouns.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.