Re: polysynthetic languages

Staving Isidora Zamora:
>>>I'm planning Magzhelyagon to be a largely fusional polysynthetic
>>>language,
>>>which its rather strange kitchen sink phonology allows. So, for example,
>>>the word for tiger, with the tone pattern for the intransitive subject
>>>singular and the stop to prenasalised stop consonant mutation that
>>>indicates the dubious evidentiality, followed by the word for fast, with
>>>the tone pattern for the present tense, an intensifying trill, a click to
>>>indicate motion towards speaker, and the fricative to lateral fricative
>>>mutation for the certain evidentiality, would express in two words
>>>"Something that may be a tiger is definitely coming towards me very
>>>quickly."
>
>Yikes!  What a unique way of expressing it.
The beauty of it is, it's very concise.

>It's nice to hear of someone using prenasalized stops in their
>conlang.  (I've been thinking for a couple of weeks of asking whether
>anyone here used them.)  I became familiar with them when I took Chichewa
>in college.  It has both syllabic nasals and homorganic prenasalized
>stops.  My 6 yo son also has prenasalized stops, interestingly
>enough.  They are in free variation with the oral stops,
>word-initially.  It shows up most often in the word "daddy," which often
>comes out as [n_d&dij] (improvising [n_d] for the prenasalized stop.  I
>would have no idea what it is he were doing had I not had Chichewa in
>college.  I still have no idea *why* he is doing it.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, prenasalised stops occur only in the
context of the dubious evidentiality. Magzhelyagon's has a lot of
gramaticalised phonemes. It's possibly the weirdest language on Huna.


>Now that I know what polysynthetic is...could someone explain to me the
>difference between agglutinative and fusional.  (Agglutinative I almost
>know what it is, but fusional I've never heard before.
I think it's the extreme end of inflecting.

Pete