Re: polysynthetic languages

>A polysynthetic language is a language that inflects the verb to the point that
>free word order is possible. They often also allow noun-verb incorporation and
>can thus express an entire sentence in a single word, like this:
>
>Xek'ûla'ikêlama.
>Xe-k'ûla-'ikê-la-ma.
>want.to-house-make-3SOI-1SSA
>I want to build a house.
>
>
>
Often, I would say that this degree of synthesis actually enforces
pretty strict order of morphemes... when a sentence can be one long
word, word order isn't really that relevant is it? All I mean is... I
wouldn't characterise polysynthetic languages by the ability to have
"free word order", since the order of the building blocks of sentences
often seems as strict as the strictest isolating language. I'm sure that
in your lang for instance I couldn't write

k'ûla-'ikê-ma-la-Xe

and still mean that I want to build a house, even if it makes sense. I
thought what Christophe said about french being polysynthetic was quite
interesting actually... and it made my wonder again like I have before,
what apart from the position of stress is the difference between a very
isolating and a very agglutinative or polysynthetic language? I mean,
what's to stop me analysing your example above by:

Xe k'ûla 'ikê la ma.

Five words of an isolating language with strict word order, and saying
that only one of them is stressed? If stress is the only difference
between an isolating and a polysynthetic language then it seems like the
distinction is over emphasized.

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