>> > Which leads to my next question...Are there any natural
>> > polysynthetic languages that do mark the nouns for case? It seems
>> > to me that it would certainly be *possible* for polysynthesizm and
>> > a case system to be found together because there are a number of
>> > languages out there that are fond of redundancy and wouldn't mind
>> > marking everything twice. 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?
>>
>> Possibly Georgian. The person and number of the subject, direct
>> object and indirect object can be indexed on the verb, and nouns are
>> declined in seven cases. I don't know how free the word order is, and
>> I don't know whether Georgian is considered polysynthetic (I don't
>> recall ever seeing the term applied to it). There are people here
>> who've actually studied the language - hopefully they can provide more
>> information. I the meantime,
>>
http://www.armazi.demon.co.uk/georgian/grammar.html
>> is a nice introductory grammar (and the source of most of what I know
>> about the language).
>
>
>
> I'll take a look at it when I get back online. Right now I am working on
> my laptop at the skating rink while my daughter practices. (I knew there
> was a reason we bought a laptop.) I have a power outlet, which is very
> good, considering that the Thinkpad's internal battery somehow failed to
> charge properly despite the fact that it has been plugged in for the last
> couple weeks straight. I'll have to hope that I can find another power
> outlet when I take her to violin class after this.
>
> Mainly, I was looking for confirmation that there were natlangs that were
> so redundant that they put both subject and object markers on the
> verbs and
> also marked nouns for case. Cristophe's comments about Basque and yours
> about Georgian confirm that this sort of redundancy is found in more than
> one language family.
>
> It's also good to know that Georgian marks verbs for indirect object,
> since
> I had the idea that I wanted Cwendaso to be able to do this for a very
> important grammatical reason, since it may not be possible to put case
> markings on the vast majority of proper nouns in the language.
>
> What I now have in mind for Cwendaso (and this is going to involve a good
> deal more work on my part because it is involves developing the
> language's
> syntactic structure over a 1500-2000 year period) is a language that
> started out as heavily agglutinative with proper names being generally
> either simple words or compounds. Then the compounded proper names
> became
> more and more complex until they became actual polysynthetic names.
> (This
> happened first with personal names and only later to place names.) So
> at a
> certain point in the language's history, a very substantial (and
> increasing) proportion of the proper names were polysynthetic, but the
> language itself was not polysynthetic yet but merely highly
> agglutinative. The polysynthetic names created some grammatical issues
> (which I won't go into here) about how to properly incorporate them
> into a
> sentence since they were both full sentences and nouns at one and the
> same
> time. The grammatical markers that arose to deal with the polysynthetic
> names later ended up having their use extended so that they were also
> used
> to join a main clause to its subordinate clause, largely displacing the
> original methods of subordinating clauses in everyday language.
> Meanwhile,
> the proportion of polysnthetic names was steadily increasing and was
> putting pressure on the language as a whole to use polysynthetic
> constructions outside of proper names. This trend continued until
> Cwendaso
> became a polysynthetic language, and nearly all of the proper names (both
> place names and personal names) were of a polysynthetic form.
>
> The Cwendaso (or Tovláugad, as they call themselves) have migrated twice,
> and in the first migration they left behind the Emitovláugad, so there
> now
> exists a sister language (or perhaps more than one) to Cwendaso which is
> not polysynthetic nor gives polysynthetic names. The protolanguage was
> highly agglutinating, marked subject and direct object on the verb (and
> possibly indirect object as well, though that may have arisen later in
> the
> Cwendaso language alone), and had a fully developed case system
> consisting
> of at least nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and
> locative (and probably others). There may have been a vocative case
> in the
> protolanuage, but, if so, it no longer exists in Cwendaso; an entirely
> different grammatical structure is used in place of vocative. The word
> order in the protolanguage was either SOV or SVO. I am going to guess
> that
> the protolanguage already had four grammatical numbers and that Cwendaso
> did not develop two of them later.
>
> The Cwendaso are an entirely oral culture, (but won't be for much longer)
> and have a very large oral poetic, historical, and ceremonial corpus, the
> very earliest portions of which were composed in the last period of the
> protolanguage just before the first migration that separated them from
> the
> other speakers of the protolanguage. Since the Cwendaso are avid
> historians, it is possible to pin down the date of composition of very
> many
> of the pieces in the oral corpus to within half a century with fair
> reliability. Phonological changes cannot be tracked through the poetic
> corpus, since the pronounciation is continually updated. (I would be
> possible to track phonological changes by attempting to reconstruct the
> protolanguage through reference to the sister language(s) and by
> analyzing
> loan words taken into the Trehelish or Nidirino languages at various
> times.) The layers of syntactic change that the language underwent
> can, to
> some extent, be traced through the oral corpus. The Cwendaso themselves
> recognize that the oldest of their songs have a distinctly different
> style
> to them than the more recent ones. In addition to the modern speech, a
> very conservative dialect of the language, based on the oral corpus, is
> used for ceremonial purposes, giving speeches, etc., and is both
> understood
> and spoken with varying degrees of eloquence by all speakers of the
> language except for young children.
>
> Isidora
>