Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Eddy Ohlms :
>
> You fell into the trap of the prescriptivist grammars and the written form
> of the French language. But Spoken French has *nothing* isolating in it,
> and is very much polysynthetic. Trust this native speaker. Spoken French is
> definitely a polysynthetic language with quite free word order and a mostly
> prefixed grammar. The orthography may make it appear like an analytic
> language using mostly suffixes, but it is showing more about the etymology
> of the language than about its current spoken state. Look for instance at
> the example you gave in your conlang:
I thought only some native American languages were polysynthetic.
>
>
> When I say something, write it down.
>
> In Written French, it look like:
>
> Quand je dis quelque chose, écris-le.
>
> But the spoken form is usually (with quite a few possible variations):
>
> /ka~ZdikEk'Soz/, /ekRi'l@/
>
> Yep, in Spoken French, it makes only *two* words (and they are pronounced
> as such, with a single accent and not even the smallest pause between what
> the written language considers are separate words). It breaks into:
>
> ka~ - S -di - kEkSoz ekRi - l@
> when-1sg-say-something write-3sgm
Fascinating.
>
>
> Note the incorporation of the object with the verb, very common in
> polysynthetic languages. Also, the way French makes compounds (they do
> exist) is typical of polysynthetic languages: it just takes full statements
> and uses them as nouns, sometimes getting rid of one affix or two. For
> instance, "porte-feuilles" (wallet) means literally "carries sheets"
> ("porte" is here a conjugated verb form). Even the written language
> acknowledges it by leaving the "s" at the end of the "feuilles" part
> although the word is singular here. It's really a frozen expression. And
> all French compounds are like that.
I see. My conlang's equivalent would be kû@ti'uuxsalôni, except that my lang
wouldn't call it that. It would use the word kû@qa!êuxsalôni for that, as @qa!ê
is a unit of money.