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That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you
by xxpor 5y ago
That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word.
The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.
- bradrn 5y ago> if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word This happens to be correct for those Yimas and Wichita examples I gave, but in many languages the relationship between the constituent parts and the word itself is extremely nontrivial, e.g. in Mohawk: tcioteriʻsioñʻhắtie né hotăskoñnioñniʻhătiḗne s-yo-ate-rihsy-u-hatye-∅ ne hro-at-askw-uny-∅-hatye-hne And in any case, most of the ‘individual words inside the big word’ aren’t ‘words’ at all but bound morphemes, in many cases with quite general semantics which are more along the lines of ‘someone caused this’ or ‘action done multiple times’ rather than anything more concrete.