Chris Bates wrote:
> 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
The would be like saying "It eddart across the room."
>
>
> 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.
Because they are verb inflections. You wouldn't say "I am smart er than you" or "It
explode ed."
>
>
> 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.
If if were isolating, the noun verb agreement suffixes(-la & -ma) wouldon't be
needed.