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Are polysynthetic languages doomed? | ||
Tags: Endangered Language | Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| yenome Hexaglot Newbie United States Joined 5378 days ago 37 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Persian Studies: Thai, Arabic (Iraqi), Mandarin | Message 1 of 24 29 March 2010 at 3:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been looking for information on all the polysynthetic languages I can find, and so far every one of them has either been dead or dying (or not completely polysynthetic). Does anyone know if there's a polysynthetic language which is still robust? It would be quite unfortunate if this wonderful class of languages died out.
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6772 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 2 of 24 29 March 2010 at 3:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Greenlandic/Inuit seems to be in pretty good shape.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 24 29 March 2010 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Inuit language is spoken by the Inuit themselves, but the number of Danes who learn it even after years on Greenland seems to be extremely small. The basic problem with polysynthetic languages could be that they are difficult to learn for morphology-scared outsiders, and that they therefore never have been able to spread to large populations. Languages with less extreme morphologies are spoken and learnt by many learners (German and Russian), while English which has an extremely reduced morphology is being adopted cheerfully all over the planet (even though it is a mess in all other respects). So the ability to spread does seem to be correlated with the complexity of the morphology, which is the main factor behind the initial steepness of the learning curve.
Just to illustrate what we are speaking about I'll quote this description of the Eskimo-Aleutic languages: Every word must have only one root (free morpheme) always at the beginning.[5] Eskimo-Aleut languages have a relatively small number of roots - in the case of Central Alaskan Yup'ik around two thousand.[6] Following the root are a number of postbases, which are bound morphemes that add to the basic meaning of the root. If the meaning of the postbase is to be expressed alone, a special neutral root (in the case of Central Alaskan Yup'ik pi) is used. Following the postbases are non-lexical suffixes that indicate case on nouns and person and mood on verbs. The number of cases varies, with Aleut languages having a greatly reduced case system compared to Eskimo. The Eskimo languages are ergative-absolutive in nouns and in Yup'ik languages, also in verbal person marking. All Eskimo-Aleut languages have obligatory verbal agreement with agent and patient in transitive clauses, and there are special suffixes used for this purpose in subordinate clauses, which makes these languages, like most in the North Pacific, highly complement deranking. At the end of a word there can be one of a small number of clitics with meanings such as "but" or indicating a polar interrogative. Edited by Iversen on 31 March 2010 at 11:37am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6772 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 24 30 March 2010 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Even if very few foreigners learn Greenlandic/Inuit (by which I include the Canadian dialects), I imagine it has
enough going on, including number of speakers and cultural output, to be considered "robust" and worthy of learning for a polyglot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5385 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 24 30 March 2010 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Quechua?
The line between agglutinative and polysynthetic is very blurry. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 24 31 March 2010 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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By definition agglutinative languages just concatenate the bits and pieces to long strings, while the polysynthetic ones mix the elements up so that the endings have several roles (and being "poly" they tag one element to the other until the whole thing becomes almost impossible to analyse).
In practice the line is blurred because many language do both things. For instance Russian behaves like an agglutinative language with its prefixes and the postfixes that mark aspect, while the endings mark it as a synthetic language. Edited by Iversen on 11 May 2010 at 1:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Makrasiroutioun Quadrilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Canada infowars.com Joined 6110 days ago 210 posts - 236 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Armenian*, Romanian*, Latin, German, Italian Studies: Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 24 11 May 2010 at 6:38am | IP Logged | ||
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The Cree-Ojibwe-Innu (Montagnais) continuum is by far the most spoken Native language in Canada, and for many communities it's still going strong. It's typically Algonquian, so that's textbook polysynthetic!
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| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5578 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 24 12 May 2010 at 5:15am | IP Logged | ||
Is that what they call the interrogative near the arctic circle? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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