Re: polysynthetic languages

Ok, I think I may have answered my queston about how a polysynthetic
language could have free word order and not mark it's nouns for case.  I
got out one of my college textbooks that I knew had a chapter in it on
Mohawk, and the information that I wanted was there.  Here is how it works
in Mohawk: Mohawk does not mark its nouns for case, but it does mark its
verbs for agreement with both subject and object, and that agreement
includes gender.  Mohawk also has free word order -- up to a point.  If you
can use the gender of the suject and object markers on the verb to
disambiguate which noun is the subject and which is the object, then you
can have free word order.  If you can't distinguish by gender but can use
semantics (Their example was "The cat drank the milk" vs. "The milk drank
the cat."  The latter is obviously absurd so the speaker must have intended
the former.) then you still have free word order.  But when you cannot use
either of these methods to establish the subject and object of the sentence
(e.g. The man hit the boy.), Mohawk resorts to a subject first word
order.  So word order in Mohawk is free up to the point where the sentence
would become ambiguous, as opposed to Latin where the word order is truly
free.  And if you don't believe that word that Latin word order is *truly*
free, go look for the place in _Pro Archias_ (IIRC) where Cicero separates
a preposition from its object by about six completely unrelated word
:-)  (Honestly!)  I was completly shocked when I saw this abuse of the
language :-)  And I *am* actually overstating it to say that word order in
Latin is *completely* free, because I know that there are certain
conventions in the Latin which cannot be violated.  Latin has prepositions,
for instance, not postpositions, and I have never seen an ablative absolute
either broken up with intervening words or placed anywhere other than at
the beginning of the sentence (but maybe I would have eventually if I'd
read more Vergil.  There is some dreadfully convoluted word ordering in
Vergil.)  But a tiny bit of research into Mohawk reveals that Latin has far
freer word order than Mohawk precisely because Mohawk does not mark nouns
for case and Latin does.

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?

Isidora

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