🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1iig56INNcko@sauna.cs.hut.fi>, linnan@batgirl (Matti Linnanvuori) writes:
>In <1993Jan6.193601.9179@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>>The next most primitive language is Turkish.  It is agglutinating.
>>Obviously, it must have grown from an isolating language, since those are
>>most primitive, by the process of concatenating isolated words into units
>>which express greater concepts.  It shows more development in the inventory
>>of sounds, as well.

>The Baltic Finnish languages don't just concatenate words. The word roots
>change differently in different cases. In Estonian, the genitive ending -n has
>worn out completely. The genitive is expressed by a root change relative to
>the lexical (nominative) root, if by anything.

Please re-read the *entire* posting *carefully*.  This was an exposition of the
position taken in the mid-19th century by pre-Neogrammarian philologists who
had not yet abandoned certain beliefs based more on prejudice than on fact.  No
modern linguist holds the views expressed in the posting to which you replied.

But taking that view for a moment:  Estonian would be taken as evidence that
agglutinative languages develop into inflectional languages, as they expected.

>Is it still right to say that these languages (Estonian in special) are
>agglunative and not inflecting? Where is the boundary?

*Historically*--remember that we are discussing an *historical* discipline, not
a synchronic one--the Finno-Ugric languages are agglutinative.  This does *not*
mean that for all time every descendent of Proto-Finno-Ugric will be agglutina-
tive.  It only means that in their history, they all were at one time of this
morphological type.

Synchronically, even Finnish shows some motion away from a "pure" agglutinative
morphology, since (some) stem-final consonants are subject to alteration in the
presence of certain case morphemes (for example).
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_