Or, put another way is there some sort of natural or practical limit on how much allomorphy a language can sustain before it becomes too confusing for its speakers?
"Allomorphy", I hope is the correct cover-term for processes such as palatalisation, vowel harmony, mutations, and so on.
Which language has the most allomorphy?
Which language has the most allomorphy?
Zompist's Markov generator wrote:it was labelled" orange marmalade," but that is unutterably hideous.
Re: Which language has the most allomorphy?
Well, not all
is allomorphy.alice wrote:palatalisation, vowel harmony, mutations, and so on
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
kårroť
kårroť
Re: Which language has the most allomorphy?
There are some languages where a whole word can be "infected" (sic) by a phonological process triggered by just one affix. Sort of like reverse vowel harmony. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurok_language# .... "Yurok has a anticipatory vowel harmony system where underlying non-high vowels /a/, /e/, and /ɔ/ are realized as [ɚ] if they precede an /ɚ/." But it also hasregressive vowel harmony, where a suffix's vowels change to be in harmony with those of the root. "Yurok Morphological processes include prefixation, infixtion, inflection, vowel harmony, ablaut, consonantal alternation,[clarification needed] and reduplication."
If you include allomorphs that cannot be proven to come from the same root, you could include the massively fusional inflection paradigms of IE nouns and verbs, and the similar setups in some Australian aboriginal languages. Finnish takes this to a far greater extreme, but for the most part the inflections in Finnish are fusional and I wouldnt analyze them as a set of thousands of allomorphs in the manner of IE.
EDIT: Sorry, I made a mistake in the sentence about Finnish. I meant " for the most part ... agglutinating". I think I originally wrote something completely different and forgot to change that one word.
If you include allomorphs that cannot be proven to come from the same root, you could include the massively fusional inflection paradigms of IE nouns and verbs, and the similar setups in some Australian aboriginal languages. Finnish takes this to a far greater extreme, but for the most part the inflections in Finnish are fusional and I wouldnt analyze them as a set of thousands of allomorphs in the manner of IE.
EDIT: Sorry, I made a mistake in the sentence about Finnish. I meant " for the most part ... agglutinating". I think I originally wrote something completely different and forgot to change that one word.
Last edited by Soap on Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:
Re: Which language has the most allomorphy?
Regrading Yurok:I don't know what is with me and memes today.
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ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
kårroť
kårroť
Re: Which language has the most allomorphy?
In what way is Finnish fusional?
Re: Which language has the most allomorphy?
It's somewhere in-between fusional and agglutinative in how the roots mutate in many ways upon adding morphological suffixes (e.g. käsi : kät-tä : käde-stä : käte-en).Qwynegold wrote:In what way is Finnish fusional?
I wouldn't call it purely fusional, but I wouldn't call it purely agglutinative either.
The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.
If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.
If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.
Re: Which language has the most allomorphy?
This goes into the semantics of what you want to define agglutinating to mean. There's a lot of allomorphy in Finnish, both in roots and affixes, but it's still pretty clear where the morpheme boundaries are.