Polysynthesis

[priana musht th der must]

Has anyone ever created a polysynthetic language(one of the words where one sentence is just one long word with a lot of affixes on it). Most native american languages are part of this system.  

[Henneth Annun]

Not me.

First I'd like to finish my current projects. ninja  

[Homurakitsune]

Didn't EI do this once? I forget. confused

I can't wrap my mind around that I like my spacebar. xD
But it sounds like something fun to experiment with. Maybe I'll try it sometime. =)  

[Eccentric Iconoclast]

I'm a total sucker for polysynthesis, but Aquénandi (which I'm sure is what Homurakitsune is talking about) is not, strictly polysynthetic; polysynthesis is dependent on rigid morpheme order (consider that the best definition of a word in linguistics is a set of morphemes in a rigid order), and although Aquénandi certainly agglutinates, the order varies depending on context and many other factors. It is a language where, rather than having one phrase roughly equal one word as in polysynthetic languages, the concept of "word" doesn't really exist at all.

Uh, it's not quite as weird as it sounds.

However, some of my languages certainly have approached polysynthesis; Mazdrivonian, in particular, has extremely complex verbs that in some cases can comprise entire utterances and a fairly rigid word order. T'ant'api is also developing towards being highly synthetic, though not polysynthetic as such.

Homurakitsune, polysynthesis much more complex than the use of a spacebar. Consider that many linguists consider French to be polysynthetic, and it certainly uses spaces. Orthographical things such as spaces are extremely, extremely superficial and do not indicate the actual structure of the language.  

[priana musht th der must]

i don't think French is polysynthetic. It's a lot like english, and most of the inflection affixes are only in writing.
such as, to conjucate manger, it would be
je manges
tu manges
il mange
nous mangeons
vous mangez
ils mangent,
where mangent, manges, and mange all take the same pronounciation.
and there is no case marking in nouns.
so, for instance, the noun "chat" remains the same in all cases:
nominative: Le chat me regarde.
accusative: J'aime le chat.
vocative: Je vais avec le chat.
genitive: L'ami de le chat.
and of all the latin(romantic?) languages, French is the closest language to a completely isolating language.  

[Sano Parmandil]

prianajalmina

i don't think French is polysynthetic. It's a lot like english, and most of the inflection affixes are only in writing.
such as, to conjucate manger, it would be
je manges
tu manges
il mange
nous mangeons
vous mangez
ils mangent,
where mangent, manges, and mange all take the same pronounciation.
and there is no case marking in nouns.
so, for instance, the noun "chat" remains the same in all cases:
nominative: Le chat me regarde.
accusative: J'aime le chat.
vocative: Je vais avec le chat.
genitive: L'ami de le chat.
and of all the latin(romantic?) languages, French is the closest language to a completely isolating language.

First of all, the vocative example is wrong, as "le chat" wouldn't be in a vocative case there. (A better example, but weirder, would be "Où es-tu, chat?") And it would be "L'ami du chat" in the genitive example, I think.

While you have a point about not being many verbal affixes, I think that EI meant the recent development of marking subject and object in the verb, like "Je t'aime", which is pronounced as a single word. I've also heard that Canadian French has "Je suis" pronounced like "Chouis", and "Je" collapsing into the verb in some other occasions. However, I don't know if I'd call French polysynthetic just because of that, as it is very, very recent and only applies in certain circumstances. It's not as if one could say "I quickly hit him with a rock" in one word yet razz

Edit: Btw, the correct term is "Romance Languages". mrgreen  

[Song Wei]

I had one like that once, but it was too hard to keep track of everything, so I just stopped lol  

[Layra-chan]

The question of what constitutes a word can't have anything to do with writing considering that spaces are a relatively modern invention and some orthographies have spaces in the middle of words; it can't have anything to do with speech because you can pause in the middle of a word.
The issue is that, regardless of how it's written or pronounced, "je t'aime" is a single word. "Je suis" is a single word. You aren't going to find "t'aime" floating around without "je" in well-formed sentences, and the "je" is going to appear right in front of "t'aime".
Note: Even when a verb doesn't appear to conjugate, like the in case of "manges" in "je manges" and "tu manges", they're still two different words. Semantically they mean different things, even if they end up being homonyms.

A word that exhibits a lot of polysynthesis would be a large ordered set of morphemes that cannot be partitioned into subsets that can each appear without the others.
A polysynthetic language would then be one in which highly-polysynthetic constructions are part of the standard grammatical repetoire, unlike in English where they've tacked on as part of the attempt at Latinization.

nerurav fluctuates between heavy polysynthesis and complete isolation; I don't like word order so I try to attach as much as I can to the relevant words, but I find myself applying more and more modifiers to entire sentences rather than individual words. So the tense markers, which used to be attached to verbs as prefixes, have now become free-standing adverbs, although they will probably gain prefix forms once I get sick of all the floating particles.
mraow, despite the lack of pauses between words, is not polysynthetic since each word is actually quite short.  

[priana musht th der must]

Sano Parmandil

prianajalmina

i don't think French is polysynthetic. It's a lot like english, and most of the inflection affixes are only in writing.
such as, to conjucate manger, it would be
je manges
tu manges
il mange
nous mangeons
vous mangez
ils mangent,
where mangent, manges, and mange all take the same pronounciation.
and there is no case marking in nouns.
so, for instance, the noun "chat" remains the same in all cases:
nominative: Le chat me regarde.
accusative: J'aime le chat.
vocative: Je vais avec le chat.
genitive: L'ami de le chat.
and of all the latin(romantic?) languages, French is the closest language to a completely isolating language.

First of all, the vocative example is wrong, as "le chat" wouldn't be in a vocative case there. (A better example, but weirder, would be "Où es-tu, chat?") And it would be "L'ami du chat" in the genitive example, I think.

While you have a point about not being many verbal affixes, I think that EI meant the recent development of marking subject and object in the verb, like "Je t'aime", which is pronounced as a single word. I've also heard that Canadian French has "Je suis" pronounced like "Chouis", and "Je" collapsing into the verb in some other occasions. However, I don't know if I'd call French polysynthetic just because of that, as it is very, very recent and only applies in certain circumstances. It's not as if one could say "I quickly hit him with a rock" in one word yet razz

Edit: Btw, the correct term is "Romance Languages". mrgreen

sorry. i meant to say dative. i get the two mixed up.