Re: polysynthetic languages

>>  Alternatively, are
>>there any natural languages that fall below the morpheme-to-word ratio
>>needed to be considered polysynthetic, rather than merely synthetic, that
>>both mark the verb for both subject and object agreement and also mark
>>nouns for case?
>
>I'm not sure, but I'd think Basque (Euskara) falls in this category.
Thanks so much for the response, Christophe.

>  The language is agglutinative, and it has case marking on the nouns
> (purely ergative, and with a lot of spatial cases and *two* different
> genitives :)) )
How do these work?  From what follows in the message, I can tell that they
have differnent uses, but how are they different, and what makes them both
genitive?

>  and its verbs agree with the subject, the object and the beneficiary!
> (i.e. the nouns in the ergative, the absolutive and the dative).
Ok, cool.  I hadn't said so, but I was also interested in knowing whether
there were natural languages that marked the verb for indirect object as
well as subject and direct object.

>  Note that an agreement affix for the beneficiary can be added to the
> verb even when there's no such beneficiary in the sentence. When it
> happens, the agreement affix is always second person, and indicates that
> the speaker wants to *include* somehow the listener in what he says.
> Spoken French has this feature too.
This sound's interesting, but I can't quite grasp the concept.  Would you
be willing to give me an example or two of it so I can understand?  (Basque
or French will do, but I'm infinitely more familiar with French, even
though I hardly speak it.)  You said "spoken French."  Does that mean that
written French doesn't have this feature?

>Note that despite all that, Basque is quite rigidly SOV.
I wonder why?  There is so much redundancy in the markings that it would
certainly be possible to loosen the word order up to the degree that Latin
did.  The marking system is certainly a lot more redundant than Latin's.

>One of the coolest features of Euskara has to be overdeclination.
[examples snipped]

That's definitely an extra-cool feature.  That's something worth studying
to see if I can use it in one of my conlangs.  (Actually, it's definitely
worth studying just for its own sake because it's so extra-cool.  You
seemed to imply that overdeclination can be used only under certain
cirumstances.  It would be interesting to see what the constraints on it are.)

>com.: comitative case
Refresh my memory, please.  What is a comitative case?  (All of the syntax
that they had us study in school was Chomskyan, and none of it was practial
or real-world.)

>loc.gen.: locative genitive
This is that second type of genitve that you were talking about.  What
exactly does it mean, and what makes it a genitive.  Is there also a plain
locative case in Basque?

Isidora

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