Re: polysynthetic languages

John Cowan wrote:
>
> Nik Taylor scripsit:
>
> > I personally consider the difference between isolating on the one hand,
> > and agglutinating/fusional on the other hand to be more important than
> > the distinction between agglutinating and fusional.  Fusional is just
> > agglutinating with morphemes merged by sound changes.
>
> Oh really?  Which five morphemes merged to make Latin -o: represent
> 1sg pres indic act?  Even if you want to say that the last three are zero.
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).

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