Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Agglutinative languages

 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
27 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7158 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 25 of 27
22 April 2015 at 6:34pm | IP Logged 
This paper by the linguists Barış Kabak and Frans Plank has examples of alternations in Korean and Turkish that remind one of fusional languages despite their often being labelled agglutinative.

Iversen wrote:
Expugnator wrote:

Georgian has polypersonal verbs, but it helped to think of them as the direct/indirect object attachments in Spanish and Portuguese (the latter even has mesoclisis):

დამირეკე! Llámame!



Excellent observation, which when applied in practice serves to remove much of the scariness of the concept of agglutination.

I would just add that the extensive use of invariable pre-, in- and suffixes in for instance Latin and Russian also is a kind of agglutination, but the inescapable focus on the difficult variable and multipurpose endings has been given priority when it came to linguistic namedropping.


The typologist Martin Hapselmath expresses somewhat similarly to Iversen in this paper when he states in the abstract:

In Haspelmath, Martin (2009) “An Empirical Test of the Agglutination Hypothesis” In: Scalise, Sergio & Magni, Elisabetta & Bisetto, Antonietta (eds.) Universals of language today. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 76.) Dordrecht: Springer, 13-29., Martin Haspelmath wrote:
...the current evidence suggests that "agglutination" is just one way of trying to capture the strangeness of non-Indo-European languages, which all look alike to Eurocentric eyes.


...and in the conclusion:

In Haspelmath, Martin (2009) “An Empirical Test of the Agglutination Hypothesis” In: Scalise, Sergio & Magni, Elisabetta & Bisetto, Antonietta (eds.) Universals of language today. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 76.) Dordrecht: Springer, 13-29., Martin Haspelmath wrote:
While Turkish could perhaps still be characterized as "agglutinating" and Latin as "fusional", for many languages neither of these terms would apply, and it would not be possible to say that they are "intermediate" between these two extremes either. It is quite possible that the reason for the success of the agglutination/fusion distinction is that Latin and Turkish have been such prominent languages in Western linguistics over the last few hundred years. They differ strikingly in their morphological systems (cf. Plank 1991), and it's perhaps natural that from this point of view one would classify languages as more Latin-like or more Turkish-like. However, linguistics should move beyond Latinocentrism and Turkocentrism and try to do justice to each language, to describe and characterize it in its own terms, or in truly universal terms.

1 person has voted this message useful



stelingo
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5834 days ago

722 posts - 1076 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian
Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin

 
 Message 26 of 27
23 April 2015 at 12:41am | IP Logged 
Interesting post, Chung,as ever. Being new to Turkish, can I just clarify
that name in the nom is ad, not at? I believe at means horse.
1 person has voted this message useful



Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7158 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 27 of 27
23 April 2015 at 1:11am | IP Logged 
You are correct. I gotta be more careful.

The alternation definitely occurs here in Turkmen and Tuvan with at and respectively.

For clarity, unspecified Turkic at can be:

Azeri, Turkish: at "horse"
Turkmen: at "horse"; "name" (cf. Kazakh, Kyrgyz)

Unspecified Turkic ad can be:

Azeri: ad "name"; "noun"
Turkish: ad "name"

Unspecified Turkic ат can be

Bashkir: ат "horse"
Kazakh, Kyrgyz: ат "horse"; "name" (cf. Turkmen)
Tatar ат "name" (cf. ат: кыргый ат "wild horse")
Tuvan ат "name" (cf. аът "gelding")
Uigur: ат "horse" (more often ئات in the modified Arabic script used by most Uigurs)



1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 27 messages over 4 pages: << Prev 1 2 3

If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 1.3906 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.