Re: isolating is equivalent to inflected

On 12/5/05, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
<SNIP>
> OK. Tell me I'm all wet on this one, but (to me, at
> least) it's an interesting speculation that raises the
> question: is the difference between an isolating
> language and an inflected language little more than
> how it was first written down?
>
> --gary
>
If I understood correcly, you are saying that an inflected language is
actually an isolating language that happened to have its functional
words attached to lexical words when people started writing it. Is
that what you said? Well, I don't think so. In an inflected language,
the functional morphemes such as verb endings have some
characteristics of their own: they are unstressed, they cannot move
independently in the sentence, they cannot show up alone etc. Also
there can be no intervening words between such morphemes and the
radicals they attach to.

So, for example, English "played" cannot be broken down into two words
play + did. You can't have words between them (compare: "He will
_probably_ play with us", but not * "He play probably did"). The fact
that sometime in the past people actually spoke "He play did" instead
of "He played" does not affect the way current English speakers
analise their language.

About the gramaticalization cycle, an example comes from the future
tense in Portuguese. Classical Latin had inflected future endings,
such as amabo (I will love) and amabit (he will love). In Ancient
Portuguese, this was lost and the future was expressed in an isolating
way with the auxiliary verb haver: eu amar hei (I will love), ele amar
há (he will love). Then this auxiliary verb became incorporated into
the verb in Modern Portuguese: eu amarei, ele amará. Currently, this
ending is being dismissed again in spoken language, though it is still
the standard way of writing. But in a conversation one would form the
future with the auxiliary verb ir: eu vou amar, ele vai amar.

João Ricardo de Mendonça