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Didn’t read the paper, but Inuktitut produces words in a compound manner, right? Not quite like Germanic languages where you can crash a bunch of adjectives and
by apothegm 1y ago
Didn’t read the paper, but Inuktitut produces words in a compound manner, right? Not quite like Germanic languages where you can crash a bunch of adjectives and nouns together to make a new word. But if I understand correctly, the syntax is such that complex concepts that in English might be a dozen-word “noun phrase” or “adjectival phrase” or extended description of an action (not sure “verb phrase” is a real term) are expressed as single, possibly extremely long, words in Inuktitut.
- foldr 1y agoYes, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the number of lexical roots that roughly correspond to English ‘snow’. We wouldn’t say that English has five words for snow because of ‘snow’, ‘snows’ (plural noun), ‘snows’ (verb), ‘snowed’, ‘snowing’.
- apothegm 1y agoAh, it’s discussing roots rather than words?