Re: any language without person/number marking you know?


"Helmut Richter" <a282244@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

Seán O'Leathlóbhair:

Richard Herring wrote:

I wonder if you missed the "spoken" in the description above? It's a
restatement of Jacques Guy's thesis that modern _spoken_ French can be
analysed as agglutinative.

I spotted the spoken and it does indeed make a big difference.

I had inserted the "spoken" in order to use phonemic writing as first
means for noting down the language. Apart from that, I do not think
that spoken French is a different language from written French.

Although the French pronouns je and tu cannot wander far from their
verbs, they are not forced to immediately precede it. The subject and
verb may be inverted, object pronouns may come between them, or the
negative particle ne may also do so.

Exactly as in Swahili where you also add object pronouns and negative
particles:

Nitacheka. I will laugh.
Nitamcheka. I will laugh at him.
Hanitamcheka. I will not laugh at him.
Mtu nitakayemcheka. The person (mtu) at whom I will laugh.

An inversion is seldom but occurs as well (the relative pronoun -ye-
going at the end):

Mtu nimchekaye. The person at whom I laugh.

The logic here being that "-ye" follows the tense/aspect particle, which was
diachronically (usually) an auxiliary verb. But in the last example, there
is no tense/aspect particle, so "-ye" follows the next verb-like component,
which is the main verb. If you agree with this analysis, there is no
inversion.

Likewise, the subject pronoun particle ("ni-" in the above), _always_ stays
in the same place relative to the verb, in all constructions, doesn't it?
(I can't find any exceptions, anyway.) Unlike French.

The reason why I would call that agglutinative is not because the
morphemes are written together (in at least one Bantu language I have
heard of, they are written apart)

I believe this was also the case in Swahili some of the early missionary
orthographies. Likewise, the linker <Ca> ("of") was written as a prefix to
the following word by some early writers. Is there any logical reason why,
when the orthography was standardised, the decision was made that particles
occuring before a verb should be treated as prefixes, while those occuring
before a noun (except for its class prefix) weren't?

Of course, in modern linguistic terminology, a stressed word plus all its
associated particles in Swahili forms a single "phonological word", no? And
the same in French, I suppose?

- most of them occur only in the context of verb conjugation
- their sequence cannot be interrupted by other words
- to some extent they depend on each other, and some combinations
cannot occur (e.g., in future tense either relative pronoun or
negation, but not both)

Agglutinative maybe but I thought that the discussion was on person and
number marking in verbs. Does agglutinative imply verb marking?

No. Japanese verbs are agglutinative, but don't mark person and number.
Likewise in Pama-Nyungan languages both nouns and verbs agglutinate, but in
many of them person and number aren't marked on verbs (or anywhere else).

[...]

John.


.

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