Greg Neumann wrote:
Kazunari Hirano wrote:
Hi Greg,
Japanese has no definate article?
No.
Wow. Languages are very interesting.
Yes, they are!
Swedish doesn't have a definate article either, but that the word
ending changes. Is that similar to Japanese?
No.
Some linguists categorized world languages into four language types:
agglutinative languages (Korean, Turkish, Japanese ...), incorporating
languages (Inuit, Basque, Aynu ...), isolated languages (Chinese,
Thai, Vietnamese ...) and inflectional language (English, French,
German ...)
Klingon has all features of agglutinative, incorporating and isolated
languages except inflectional language.
:)
khirano
Heh! My wife just the "Klingon-English Dictonary" today going through
boxes of books in the "storage" porch. Coincidence?
Now all I have to do is figure out what "agglutinative" means. Plus the
other terms in that context. Offhand, I'd call English "incorporating"
because it incorporates new words so easily. I'm making them up all the
time! ;-)
"Isolating" or "analytic" languages are those in which words don't alter
according to grammar, and the grammar is pretty much entirely a matter
of word order. The classic example is Chinese.
"Inflecting" or "synthetic" languages are those in which grammatical
functions are carried by changes in the words. Latin and Greek are
classic (and Classic) examples. English is historically in this family,
but is moving toward isolating. (Replacing "He kissed her yesterday,"
with "He kiss she yesterday," is not yet correct English, but it is
understandable; in Latin, it would be a train wreck.)
"Agglutinative" languages are those in which clearly distinct morphemes
are piled together to make the words. German's long words are examples
of agglutination, but German is not regarded as an agglutinative
language, because the basic grammar doesn't work that way. For example,
in an agglutinative language, assuming that verbs work in the same way
they do in English (they don't always, by any means), a verb might be of
the form:
base-meaning+tense-marker+person-marker+voice-marker+mood-marker
but the actual situation in German is that each verb has a host of
combined meaning/tense/person/voice/mood forms, just as in Latin.
"Incorporating" or "polysynthetic" languages go even further with the
agglutination; it is difficult in polysynthetic languages to make a
clear distinction between "words" and "sentences".
--
John W. Kennedy
"...if you had to fall in love with someone who was evil, I can see why
it was her."
-- "Alias"
