Re: polysynthetic languages

Nik Taylor wrote:Well, okay, so they're presumably not always historically
separate

> morphemes (altho, I don't actually know much about IE historical
> linguistics), but at any rate, whether historically separate or always a
> single morpheme isn't the important part.  The important part is that
> we're dealing with affixes.  Whether a language indicates "1st person
> present indicative active" with, say, 4 distinct morphemes or a single
> morpheme is less important than whether those morphemes can occur
> independently of the verb.  You can't say just "o:" in Latin, for
> example, but in English you can say "I do" (which is the closest English
> equivalent of that meaning).
My conlang is omewhat fusional. There are 48 suffixes for noun-verb agreement,
but tnese, aspect, etc. are indicated separately.