#polysynthesis

[dedalvs]

If I may ask,

Ive been trying to make a polysynthetic language for quite some time but it always seems to go poorly. I know this is a really vague goal, but do you have any tips for this endeavour?

Thanks! (Also congratulations on the marriage! You two are the cutest couple ever)

Thanks! <3

Re: polysynthetic languages, they're a lot like isolating languages, but there are phonological cues that tell you that the big word you're creating is all one word. Try to get those phonological changes settled. For example, in Inuktitut, a word only ever ends with one of four sounds:

a vowel

-k

-q

-t

As a result, the kind of sound changes that occur are always similar. That is, /k/ will often change to the same thing when followed by a consonant or a vowel, and /q/ will often change to the same thing, etc. so it's really easy to tell that the word isn't done yet (in addition to stress).

When it comes to the kind of affix-building that happens, though, this is what you always need to keep sight of: (1) what constitutes a nominal and verbal termination (where the word is going to end), (2) what word base a suffix applies to, and (3) what the result is. The meanings will get confusing, but the lexical categories shouldn't.

Beyond that, when it comes to inspiration, honestly, the types of affixes you get in polysynthetic languages aren't very different from what you get in non-polysynthetic languages; the differences is that they can be piled onto a single word. The types of meanings you get are usually shunted off on auxiliaries in non-polysynthetic languages. Now they're not auxiliaries: They're affixes.

But, I mean, it's just tough. No two ways about it. In fact this coming Thursday @quothalinguist and I are revisiting our polysynthetic mouse language, and, let me tell you, it was difficult, we don't 100% get it still, and we likely made mistakes. But that's part of the fun!

[linguisten]

The Cree language can be likened to the world’s most mechanically intricate clocks that, despite their innumerable moving parts, display time using only two or three hands. Similarly, our beautiful language is built on a rich, but incredibly complex, grammatical structure, and yet boasts only a simple repertoire of vowels and consonants. In this way, our language sounds deceptively simple, but its grammar has thwarted many in their attempts to learn to speak it. Certainly, numerous factors aside from grammar conspire against the would-be Cree speakers. Inconsistent orthographies, sparse learning materials, dialectal differences, and even idiolectal preferences are complicit. But there is one grammatical feature that is so unfamiliar to speakers of European languages that it usually escapes their attention, only to repeatedly frustrate their efforts at speaking with any degree of fluency. This feature is called polysynthesis. Polysynthesis is the process of stringing together many morphemes, or word-parts, into long words that would be typically expressed as sentences in non-polysynthetic languages. What better way then to illustrate this process than by presenting here what many say is the longest Cree word ever?

[sannehnagi]

More long words and how to make them:

Yesterday I got to talking to a friend about my conlang and they asked why some of the words are so short, single syllables even, and others convey complete sentences and possibly even multiple clauses.

So I started building a word for them.

Ta- I go.

Tšita- I am walking.

Šanar- I die.

Šanešre- he died.

Tšitišanešrra'a- I am walking to the place where he died.

Yaása- I am crying.

Yaásátšitišanešrra'a- crying I am walking to the place where he died.

Oncarinara- I am sending a voice to him.

Apë- my parent

Apëcarinara- I am sending a voice to my parent.

Uyóhapë'carinar'yaásátšitišanešrra'a- Weeping, I am walking to the place where my parent died to send a voice to his spirit.

[logodaidalos]

Basics of Grammar - Typological Considerations

In general, human languages can be grouped according to many things, one of which is their morphological typology: they can be, among other things, divided into analytic and synthetic languages, or rather placed on the analytic-synthetic continuum. On the analytic end, languages have approximately one morpheme per word, and on the synthetic end they have multiple morphemes per word. Languages such as Mandarin are very analytic, and those such as Latin are moderately synthetic.

At the far end of the synthetic part of the continuum, we find polysynthetic languages. Polysynthetic languages are basically languages with highly inflected words where pretty much everything revolves around verbs.

I think polysynthesis is where we could put trollish.

To elaborate more on the topic of polysynthetic languages, they are languages have verbs that possess a very high level of inflection, noun incorporation and polypersonal agreement.

Those last two are the most important.

Polypersonal agreement is just a term for having verbs agree with multiple arguments at once. While in English "sings" only tells us that the subject of this verb would be in the third person singular, sentences such as "I gave her it" require multiple words. Trolls would deal with this by inflecting the verb for all three arguments -- the agent, patient and recipient -- all at once. This would also mean that, as in f.e. Latin's "cantō" being translated as "I sing", pronouns for arguments would not be needed and would be used only for emphasis.

Noun incorporation is a process, usually valency-reducing, that transfers whole arguments from the sentence as a whole to specifically inside the verb. We can show this in English by comparing "She is picking berries" and "She is berry-picking", where "berries" becomes incorporated into the verb, which then becomes intransitive. Polysynthetic languages basically do this, but only on a much larger scale.

Noun incorporation is divided into four classes:

Patient incorporation for the purposes of narrowing down the function of the verb

Core argument incorporation as to make way for non-core (oblique) arguments to be emphasised

Incorporation of "old information"

Incorporation of semantically broad noun-like morphemes to use as verb classifiers and as regular inflection

To give examples for all four classes of incorporation:

"I tree-chopped today"

"I tree-chopped my field today"

"A whale came to us, and they whale-attacked it"

"A whale they fish-saw, and then they fish-attacked it until it fish-died"

According to current analyses of polysynthesis, all languages that have one type of incorporation will always have all other types of incorporation under it.

As for trollish, I'm thinking the language wouldn't work all that smoothly and elegantly with class four incorporation; second or third level incorporation seems quite good enough!

—Nexvs

[letsnui]

Something Silly

Tahutaminamkiponu

Ta-[hu-tami-nam-ki]-ponu

I-[you-strike-him/her-noun]-see

I see you strike him/her

[hannahbethisdyslexic]

Like many things in life, linguistics often gives you the opportunity to chose between one bad thing and ....another bad thing.

Dr. Ball, on polysynthesis theories