OT: Languages (was: Is Haskell a Good Choice for Web Applications? (ANN: Vocabulink))
wren ng thornton schrieb:
Chris Forno (jekor) wrote:
That being said, Esperanto, and even Japanese sentence structure perhaps is not as different as an agglutinative language like German. I'll need to study it more to find out.
Actually, Japanese is agglutinative too (moreso than German is).
I take it the above calling German agglutinative was sort of a typo, because well, it isn't, except having many compound words. Esperanto, on the other hand, is usually described as agglutinative. Kalman
Kalman Noel wrote:
wren ng thornton schrieb:
Chris Forno (jekor) wrote:
That being said, Esperanto, and even Japanese sentence structure perhaps is not as different as an agglutinative language like German. I'll need to study it more to find out. Actually, Japanese is agglutinative too (moreso than German is).
I take it the above calling German agglutinative was sort of a typo, because well, it isn't, except having many compound words.
Indeed. The proliferation of compound words is noteworthy, but it's not generally considered an agglutinative language. From what (very little) German I know compounds tend to be restricted to nouns, as opposed to languages like Turkish, Japanese, Korean,...
Esperanto, on the other hand, is usually described as agglutinative.
I'll take your word for it :) -- Live well, ~wren
On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 6:44 AM, wren ng thornton
Kalman Noel wrote:
Esperanto, on the other hand, is usually described as agglutinative.
I'll take your word for it :)
Consider malsanulejestro (the head of a hospital): mal-san-ul-ej-estr-o (un-health-person-place-leader-noun, or leader of the place of unhealthy people). --Max
wren ng thornton wrote:
Indeed. The proliferation of compound words is noteworthy, but it's not generally considered an agglutinative language. From what (very little) German I know compounds tend to be restricted to nouns, as opposed to languages like Turkish, Japanese, Korean,...
Yes, compounds are restricted to nouns in German. But as I understand it, agglutinative relates more to the inflection system than to the lexicon anyway. In German, inflection is usually done by adding a single suffix to the stem, and possibly altering the stem. The single suffix encodes various informations (e.g. number, gender and case for nouns) in a single morpheme. In an agglutinative language, inflection is done by adding one morpheme per information. Tillmann
Tillmann Rendel wrote:
wren ng thornton wrote:
Indeed. The proliferation of compound words is noteworthy, but it's not generally considered an agglutinative language. From what (very little) German I know compounds tend to be restricted to nouns, as opposed to languages like Turkish, Japanese, Korean,...
Yes, compounds are restricted to nouns in German. But as I understand it, agglutinative relates more to the inflection system than to the lexicon anyway.
In general, I'm not sure I draw a distinction there. What belongs in the grammar vs what belongs in the lexicon is rather fluid and depends on both the language and the theory in question; whereas the phenomenon is, I think, easily identifiable (if not always easily definable). That is, the distinction between agglutinative vs fusional is typological rather than theoretical. The distinction has to do with information content per morpheme (or compositional vs idiomatic information construction). For determining this, root/base morphemes are included just as much as inflectional morphemes. The distinction between what is "root" vs what is "inflection" is a spectrum and not always clear cut, especially in agglutinative languages. In languages like Japanese which lacks spaces, this difficulty is highlighted by the fact that it's not always clear whether something is a "word" or a "phrase" (and hence whether the latter major segment contains base morphemes, or is "only inflection"). Though yes, the distinction is most clearly observed by looking at verbal inflections. And now we're really far off topic :) -- Live well, ~wren
wren ng thornton
That is, the distinction between agglutinative vs fusional is typological rather than theoretical.
Though yes, the distinction is most clearly observed by looking at verbal inflections. And now we're really far off topic :)
No, we aren't. A couple of days ago, I considered replacing a couple of highly regular function definitions by three lists and two calls to <*>, but didn't do it as I would still have to name the resulting functions by hand, to use them, and TH seemed utter overkill. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.
participants (5)
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Achim Schneider -
Kalman Noel -
Max Rabkin -
Tillmann Rendel -
wren ng thornton