Isidora Zamora wrote:
> Isidora, the linguistist who is quite embarassingly ignorant of language
> typology thanks to the courses offered/not offered at her school, would be
> immensely grateful to anyone who would very kindly take the time to explain
> to her what a polysynthetic language is.
>
> (She plans on correcting her comlete ignorance of typology in the near
> future with the help of some textbooks, but for the time being, she'd love
> a definition.)
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.