Re: polysynthetic languages

>>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.

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.

>Point taken. It seems more... joined if there are the morphemes affect
>each other a lot... ie fuse together, or there's vowel harmony, or
>insertion of consonants to make them join better (a la Turkish and
>French). But if a language is poly synthetic and very agglutinative
>rather than fusional, it still seems like it wouldn't that be difficult
>to make an argument to classify the language as isolating rather than
>polysynthetic if you wanted to.
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.

>BTW, your lang sounds just a little evil... which isn't bad of course.
>:) Has anyone come up with that universal breaking language yet?
Nah, I'm working on *learning* about the universals (and typology) so that
I don't break universals in unacceptible ways.  Though Heather's typology
class assignment did sound like a lot of fun.  (A consonant inventory made
up entirely of fricatives...lol...that's great!  I don't think that I'd
have been able to have gotten nearly so inventive as she did.  I'd have
probably included a whole bunch of voiced fricatives, but no unvoiced one
-- and no /s/.  That's also pretty unlikely.)

Isidora

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