Hello "JWK" :-) it's a rather impressive comment! I should add to this that languages share an historical burden. You mentioned German. German is a Germanic language with a Latin Grammar. This grammar has been imposed, and is not "native-german". French is considered to be a roman language (latin), but it is more exactly a 15% celtic, 80% latin , 5% germanic language... Languages are political too...
Charles. On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 10:15 -0400, John W. Kennedy wrote: > > "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". >
