Re: polysynthetic languages

Isidora Zamora wrote:

> I'm seriously considering making my main conlang polysynthetic (it's still
> very young, so there's still room for decisions like that), but I'm the one
> who got an undergraduate degree in linguistics and managed to come out of
> it nearly totally ignorant of typology, so I will firts have to get a book
> on typology and try to understand it before I can apply what I learn to any
> of my three conlangs.  Meanwhile, my conlangs have no typology.
Polysynthetic means that the verb agrees with both the subject and object or
the equivalents in another case system like ergative. You need noun classes,
like gender or composition, and number for your verb to agree with. You have a
set of agreement affixes for each person(1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, another 3rd
person for if you have a sentence with 2 third person nouns and they have the
same number and noun class.). WIth the verb marked for all this, you can have
free word order. Polylangs also usually allow noun-verb incorporation, in which
the noun is attached to the verb, like in babysit.