Are polysynthetic languages doomed? (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Are polysynthetic languages doomed?
Tags: Endangered Language \| Morphology
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24 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

morganie
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Message 17 of 24

20 August 2010 at 10:37pm | IP Logged

So just wondering, do people really find polysynthetic languages that hard? I mean, there are a lot of rules but they seem mostly very regular, and it doesn't seem like too much of a challenge to put the morphemes together into one word.
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Declan1991
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Message 18 of 24

22 August 2010 at 12:48am | IP Logged

Aquila123 wrote:

Also Italian has a structure that comes very near to this criterium. The object must either be placed directly after the verb as a continuation of this or there must be a enclitic pronoun in the predicate structure that points to the object.

I can't speak about Italian, but I presume the situation is relatively similar to French. Spoken French is sometimes analysed as being polysynthetic, it's certainly close if not quite there yet.

As to whether they are dying out, there isn't really a classical polysynthetic language that isn't a minority language, but I certainly wouldn't class them all as dying. Furthermore, other languages are moving in that direction, so even if they do, we might find that others take their place pretty quickly.

Edited by Declan1991 on 22 August 2010 at 12:49am
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Juаn
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Message 19 of 24

22 August 2010 at 5:19am | IP Logged

What kind of materials are actually there for learning Greenlandic or Inuktitut? I'd absolutely love to give either of those a try. I wouldn't mind learning Danish first in order to have access to its resources.
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yenome
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Message 20 of 24

22 August 2010 at 5:21am | IP Logged

Inuktitut resources: http://www.tusaalanga.ca/
http://www.archive.org/details/rosettaproject_kal_gen-3
http://www.omniglot.com/babel/inuktitut.php#inuktitun
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Juаn
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Message 21 of 24

23 August 2010 at 5:39am | IP Logged

yenome wrote:

Inuktitut resources: http://www.tusaalanga.ca/
http://www.archive.org/details/rosettaproject_kal_gen-3
http://www.omniglot.com/babel/inuktitut.php#inuktitun

Thanks!

Can one obtain printed books? What about radio stations?

These languages (dialects of one language?) seem fascinating to me.
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yenome
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Message 22 of 24

24 August 2010 at 6:08am | IP Logged

There's a Navajo radio station, but I'm not aware of any for Inuktitut. The Pirurvik Centre has a few books, but it's not clear to me whether they are at all different from the lessons on their website. In any event, you'd probably get further asking them about printed resources, given that all I have is a thin, outdated dictionary : )

These are definitely interesting languages. It's just a shame, to touch back on the original topic of the thread, that so many of them are dead/dying.
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Declan1991
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Message 23 of 24

24 August 2010 at 12:31pm | IP Logged

Juаn wrote:

What kind of materials are actually there for learning Greenlandic or Inuktitut? I'd absolutely love to give either of those a try.

You'll have to be pretty determined initially to learn a polysynthetic language. There is an awful lot of information you will have to absorb quickly to gain even conversational ability. Don't let that put you off however, every language has its hard points, morphology just happens to be the hard point for most polysynthetic languages (it's worse for Navajo, that's really hard to learn!).
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Aquila123
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Message 24 of 24

30 August 2010 at 11:17pm | IP Logged

You have the wikipedia both in Navajo

http://nv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Diyis%C3%AD%C3%AD_Naaltsoo s

and Greenlandic

http://kl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqqaa

As for the grammer,you will get a pretty good impression by reading the wikipedia articles about these languages.

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