Re: polysynthetic languages

Tristan McLeay wrote:
> > And you could say, "it did" but not "it ed." Or "more, more" but not
> > "er, er." They're just not the same thing.
>
> You can't say 'it tomato',  either.
Yes, but that's not the point.  "Tomato" is pretty free in how you can
use it.  In certain situations, it requires nothing before it.
"Tomatoes are red" for example.  It also requires nothing after it.
It's a FREE MORPHEME, and the only restrictions are syntactic
restrictions, for example "it + noun" isn't legal in most dialects.  -ed
or -er on the other hand are BOUND morphemes.  They MUST follow a verb
or an adjective, respectively.  You can NEVER use them by themselves.

Another good example: In English, ability is indicated by a free
morpheme "can".  Thus, you can say things like "I can't" or "Go there if
you can".  On the other hand, in Japanese, it's indicated by an
inflection, thus, you would have to say "I can't [verb]" and "Go there
if you can go".  For example:
English:
"Did you go to the party?"
"I couldn't"
Japanese:
Paatii ni itta no? (lit. Party to go-past question)
Ikenakatta (lit. Go-able-neg-past, i.e., "I couldn't go")
Since -e, "able", is an inflection, it MUST be attached to a verb.

English:
"Go there if you can"
Japanese:
Ikereba, soko ni itte (lit. go-able-if there to go)
I'm not sure if that's exactly correct, but I do know that you'd have to
use a form of the verb _iku_ "go", in both clauses.

I personally consider the difference between isolating on the one hand,
and agglutinating/fusional on the other hand to be more important than
the distinction between agglutinating and fusional.  Fusional is just
agglutinating with morphemes merged by sound changes.

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