Olekander Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5883 days ago 122 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, French, Russian
| Message 33 of 37 29 January 2009 at 7:28am | IP Logged |
I myself never thought they were agglutinative, Ugric languages ect are agglutinative, It would be interesting to see what Iversen meant when he implied that russian German and czech were agglutinative. I can possibly understand the slavic ones, but German?
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Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6148 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes
| Message 34 of 37 29 January 2009 at 8:22am | IP Logged |
As I understand it, Iversen meant that at some point in time, the ancestral language of the Germanic, Slavic and Italic language families - namely, Proto-Indo-European was agglutinative. Over time, through sound shifts etc, it became flexive and split into the languages we know today. Currently, most descendants of that language have or are in the process of getting rid of their cases with the exception of the Slavic languages, German and Icelandic.
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Olekander Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5883 days ago 122 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, French, Russian
| Message 35 of 37 29 January 2009 at 9:09am | IP Logged |
That seems a shame, once you've cracked them, its very satisfying to speak thus. :(.
Anyway, russian is my focus at the moment, it's not proving as horrible has people have claimed it, but I am finding the stress an issue.
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farrioth Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6090 days ago 171 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Esperanto, Sanskrit, Japanese
| Message 36 of 37 29 January 2009 at 8:10pm | IP Logged |
Olekander wrote:
As for morhpology, where is the problem? Greek, move/change. Morphology is the changing of language over a number of years? |
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No. Morphology refers to the internal structure of words, and the branch of linguistics concerned with this.
Olekander wrote:
I may well have totally mis interpreted the post, but It seems to me that he is implying that they were once agglutinatve. No? |
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What Alkeides said. I suppose Iversen was implying that PIE had an agglutinative ancestor. I recall hearing arguments for morphological typology being cyclic over time (changing type).
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vaasha Tetraglot Newbie Czech Republic lelaon.com Joined 5786 days ago 13 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Norwegian, Finnish Studies: Welsh
| Message 37 of 37 30 January 2009 at 3:26am | IP Logged |
farrioth wrote:
What Alkeides said. I suppose Iversen was implying that PIE had an agglutinative ancestor. I recall hearing arguments for morphological typology being cyclic over time (changing type). |
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There are theories that languages goes from agglutination to inflextion then to isolation and back to agglutination. The language when it first emerged was with high probability isolating using just simple words. Then it might have gone to agglutinative when some particles got sticked to the words and by language change these have broken into fusional ones. Present science supouse that Proto-Indo-European was fusional (8 cases, 2 genders (later introducing 3rd one), 3 numbers for nouns) however the inflection was lost in some branches (vulgar latin -> western Romance lang., Italian).
This took more the 5000 years but for example Slavic languages are still quite similar to reconstructed state some 4000BC. For example Czech lost only Ablative case, dual number, aorist tense and some other pasts. And Czech like other Slavic people expand some features to even greater difficulty (causing no problem to the natives) like our verb aspect categories.
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