zompist bboard

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.

Well, not all

alice wrote:palatalisation, vowel harmony, mutations, and so on

is 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.

Regrading Yurok:I don't know what is with me and memes today.

In what way is Finnish fusional?

Qwynegold wrote:In what way is Finnish fusional?

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).

I wouldn't call it purely fusional, but I wouldn't call it purely agglutinative either.

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.